MPFR in MacPorts

[Toby Peterson]

On Jun 10, 2010, at 11:26 AM, Jack Howarth wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 06:23:08PM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
>> On 2010-06-10 11:50:49 -0400, Jack Howarth wrote:
>>> Exactly the point. MacPorts sorely needs the same sort of split-off
>>> feature as fink where a libmpfr2-shlibs/libmpfr3-shlibs split-off
>>> package could contain the required runtime shared libraries which
>>> can co-exist but the main libmpfr2/libmpfr3 packages with the
>>> development headers and shared lib symlinks would conflict. The
>>> absence of such a capability in MacPorts is a major limitation
>>> to proper package migrations. One simply can't expect to force
>>> all packages in mass to migrate to new soversions of a support
>>> library, Some backward compatibility support has to be retained
>>> through co-existing shlibs split-off packages.
>> 
>> Note however that in the case of MPFR, ABI breakage is rare. IIRC,
>> ABI compatibility had been preserved since November 2004.
> 
> Yes, but that is tangential to the fact that any soversion bump for
> a support library in MacPorts currently forces a mass migration to
> the new version since there is no support for co-existing shlibs
> split-off packages with conflicting main development packages.
> Hoping for ABI stability isn't a solution.

Of course we support that (sort of, since we don't have "packages" in MacPorts). I'm not sure what your complaint is - Vincent's initial email simply stated that MPFR is not going to be updated immediately.

If there is a pressing need for both versions to be available, we can certainly do the work required.

- Toby