[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: [RFC] xulrunner, shlibs, and dependencies.



Mike Hommey wrote:
> Hi
> 
> As you may or may not know, I'm currently working on packaging
> xulrunner, which is ought to be the central point for all future mozilla
> technology, meaning that at more or less long term, all mozilla products
> (firefox, thunderbird, etc.) will be built on top of it.
> That will be indeed a great improvment in both memory (who really wants
> to have libraries loaded twice just because you run 2 of their programs)
> and security management.
> 
> Anyways, the mid-term plan would be to migrate the applications that use
> mozilla as a platform (such as epiphany, galeon, kazehakase, etc.) to
> build on top of xulrunner (libxul, actually) instead of the current
> mozilla, and instead of having a firefox-dev package as requested in
> #322521.
> 
> I'd like to make everybody's life easier, and would like to improve the
> current situation, but I'd like some feedback on my ideas, to know if my
> solutions are the proper ones or if I should explore some other ways.
> 
> Nowadays, when the mozilla ABI breaks, which happens quite often (though
> it is supposed to get better in the future), all the epiphany, galeon
> and friends break and need rebuilding with the newer mozilla (if there's
> no API breakage at the same time, in which case some changes are needed
> in the programs).
> 
> In the current situation, the dependencies are quite useless. We can't
> really stick to a strict dependency, which would be painful (every new
> upload of mozilla would need a rebuild of its reverse dependencies), and
> we can't set a >= dependency either, because of the breakage.
> 
> So my idea is the following :
> - First, I want to provide the libs with a correct soname. It won't be
> compatible with upstream until some people use clue sticks, but i'll do
> my best for them to improve on that point. Having a correct soname will
> enable us to actually use the shlibs mecanism.
> 
> - Now, the problem is that we can't really use the sonames correctly,
> because if we succeed in the clue stick batting, we'll have different
> sonames, which, in the long term, would be painful. So, I'd like to
> provide a dummy gecko-x.y-serial or such package, which would correctly
> depend on the libxul package (with strict version if necessary), and the
> .shlibs in the libxul-dev package would say to depend on the
> gecko-x.y-serial package.
> 

Assuming this is otherwise fine, wouldn't it be better to do what apt
does.  Namely have gecko-x.y-serial be a virtual package provided by libxul.

Travis



Attachment: signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature


Reply to: