VTK port naming conventions

Darren Weber dweber at macports.org
Mon Apr 27 16:03:05 PDT 2009


>
>  I have not had enough experience with VTK to know how compatible it is
>> across minor version releases.  To provide flexibility, I've assumed that
>> vtkXY should be sufficient to provide the major.minor (X.Y) version
>> specificity for any port that depends on VTK (ie, I've not considered vtkXYZ
>> to be necessary).  Certainly vtkX at a minimum to provide the major release
>> compatibility.
>>
>> At this point, do we have a consensus that port names should have a
>> version string in the name?  (We may not agree on the specificity of that
>> version string - vtkX, vtkXY, vtkXYZ - but it appears the @ syntax is not an
>> option.)
>>
>
> A number should only be used in the port name if you need to have multiple
> ports that install multiple different versions of the software. For most
> ports, this should not be necessary; just provide a single port with the
> latest version of the software.
>
> To know how this should be handled for vtk, you need to answer the
> question: why would a user install the old version if a new version is
> available? Why would a user install vtk 4.4.2 if 5.2.1 is available? Why
> would a user install vtk 5.2.1 if 5.4 is available? If there is no reason
> why a user would do this, then multiple ports are not needed.
>

Quick update on this section of our discussion, see
http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/VTK_FAQ#Changes_to_the_VTK_API

It provides some indication that the API for VTK can change with a lot of
flexibility, so we might expect the minor release versions of VTK to break
some parts of the API sometimes.  In this case, any software that depends on
VTK might need either (a) a dependency on an old minor release version (eg,
vtkXY) or (b) an update to the source to adjust for API changes.

Regards, Darren
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