MPFR in MacPorts

[Jack Howarth]

On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 09:09:32AM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> On 2010-06-10 21:37:53 -0700, Toby Peterson wrote:
> > I don't understand what you're trying to say. Do you mean a design
> > deficiency in MacPorts itself? If so, that makes no sense - ports
> > can install files anywhere.
> 
> I think the point is that a single build (compilation) cannot install
> several ports (e.g. one port for the shared library itself, and one
> port for the other files, such as the header file, the documentation,
> and so one), so that if an upgrade uses an incompatible ABI, the old
> shared library (and only this) can be kept.

Yes, fink's description of their approach to this can be found here...

http://www.finkproject.org/doc/packaging/policy.php?phpLang=en#sharedlibs

While it is a noble aim to try to migrate all packages to the latest
upstream release of their required support libraries, the absence of
a co-existing shlibs packages prevents packages which requiring different
soversions of the shared libs to be installed at the same time. I would
argue this makes the upgrade process to the new soversioned shared lib
packages unnecessarily painful under MacPorts since the users would have
to wait until all of their mission-critical packages are updated to
a common soversion of the shared libraries. Also, a lot of scientific
software is effectively orphanware making it unrealistic in some cases
to expect those to ever be fully updated for the latest soversion of
the support shared libraries. Often, one should just be grateful that
some of the older codes are fully functional on architectures like
x86_64 which they significantly predate.
               Jack

> 
> -- 
> Vincent Lefèvre <vincent at vinc17.net> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/>
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