library versioning

[Jeff Franks]

Brian J. Tarricone wrote:

> hi all,
>
> i have an idea... not sure if it's worth the work, but i thought i'd 
> put it out there.  in light of all the problems with people upgrading, 
> and trying to use parallel stable and CVS, do we perhaps want to start 
> versioning the filenames of our libs a bit better?

Good idea.

>
> ideally, we'd be doing something like "libxfcegui-4.3.so", 
> "libxfceutil-4.3.so", etc. etc.  note that i took the "4" out of the 
> library names altogether, which i guess might be a bit lame to do at 
> this point, so we'd stick with the lameness of "libxfcegui4-4.3.so" 
> and "libxfce4util-4.3.so", etc.  or perhaps, since we're versioning 
> the .pc files as, e.g., "libxfcegui4-1.0.pc", we could just increment 
> the minor on that guy, and use that in the filename versioning as 
> well.  so we'd have, for the current CVS, libxfcegui4-1.3.pc and 
> libxfcegui4-1.3.so.  or something like that.

It really should be libxfcegui-4.3.pc, not libxfcegui4-1.3.pc. Why have 
an extra version number (1.3) tacked on the end.

>
> benefits:
> 1) no more complaints about "undefined: xfce_builtin_license_GPL" and 
> the like.
> 2) no more complaints from people wanting to install both in parallel 
> (presumably, to different prefixes: i'm not advocating putting minor 
> version suffixes on the binaries too).
> 3) easier for us devs to have 4.2 and stable on our machines for 
> patching and bugfixing and testing and whatnot.
>
> annoyances:
> 1) we have to figure out the naming scheme.  if we want to do it the 
> totally aesthetic way (libxfceutil-4.3), then that involves actually 
> changing the package name, which would probably be more trouble than 
> it's worth.  so we could just do libxfce4util-4.3, or libxfce4util-1.3 
> (i prefer -4.3).  looks a little confusing, but who cares, really?

Wasn't this one of the issues raised by Benedikt, rationalizing the 
names and number of CVS modules?

> 2) plugins would now be required to update their dependencies when we 
> do a new 4.x release, since (presumably) the normal user would want to 
> uninstall their old libraries when they upgrade, and since the soname 
> is different, they'll have dangling library deps.  for 4.2, all we 
> required was a recompile, which the user can do on their own.  but 
> updating the required library soname requires configure.ac hacking 
> (ok, it's only a one-line change per library, but still).  to be the 
> most flexible, this would require something lame-looking like:
>
> BM_DEPEND_CHECK([LIBXFCE4UTIL], [libxfce4util-4.3], [4.2.0])
> if test "x$LIBXFCE4UTIL_FOUND" != "xyes"; then
>    BM_DEPEND([LIBXFCE4UTIL], [libxfce4util-1.0], [4.2.0])
> fi
>
> so, thoughts?  i'd be willing to make the required 
> makefile/configure.ac/pkgconfig changes necessary for all modules, 
> though 3rd-party plugin authors would have to make the changes 
> themselves.

It would be worth making these changes,  so that the problem gets fixed, 
once and for all.

Just my thoughts,
Jeff Franks