Re: GCC 3.2 transition

[martin@v.loewis.de (Martin v. Loewis)]

Matthew Wilcox <willy@debian.org> writes:

> This is a proposal. You will be notified when this is a real plan

I think Jeff Bailey's plan is entirely different, and I like his plan
more. Here are the differences.

>      * If you maintain a library written in C++, add a `c' to the end of
>        the name of your .deb, eg libdb4.0++.deb -> libdb4.0++c.deb. This
>        is similar in spirit to the glibc transition adding `g' to the end
>        of libraries.

In Jeff's plan: do nothing.

>    At some point in the future, we will change gcc-defaults to make
>    gcc-3.2 the default on all architectures. At that time, you should
>    remove the setting of CXX and the explicit dependency on g++-3.2. You
>    should not rename your package to remove the `c' suffix until upstream
>    change their soname.

In Jeff's plan: All C++ packages will be uploaded via NMUs. The
package maintainer can upload their packages afterwards if they have
to make other corrections.

>    Why don't we just change the sonames?

Because it is easiest to have just two binary-incompatible
libraries. They can't coexist, and they don't need to, most of the
time. When they do, the old versions can be put in a separate
directory.

>    Why don't we put the libs in a different directory?
> 
>    Basically, it's too complex. For the glibc transition, we could do
>    this because they used different dynamic linkers.

For C++, we can do this because we have the source of nearly all
packages, and can recompile them. There won't be much C++ libraries
that are needed by packages for which we don't have the source to.

Regards,
Martin