[DebianGIS] Re: libgdal renaming

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[Jon Saints]
> GDAL is almost ready, except I belive that the recent changes I made
> to the library name need to be undone.  If it is true that the
> debian archive removes the binary if a package no longer produces
> it, then I see no way for us to maintain multiple versions of
> libgdal in the repository.  Am I wrong?

You are right.  There only way to keep multiple versions of libgdal in
the debian archive is by giving them different source package names.
But the important thing is that people with qgis installed will have
the old libgdal library installed, and this will keep working until a
new qgis build with the new gdal is available from the archive.
Because of this, the libraries should probably change name when a new
version is available.  It will keep the installed packages working
until all of them are upgraded to use the new libgdal library.

>  It seems that we are left with recompiling qgis and mapserver
>  everytime there is new gdal.  This means we will skip some new
>  versions of gdal in the interest of keeping the mapserver and qgis
>  working.

Yes, we need to rebuild the packages in the archive, and those will be
uninstallable after a new gdal library is unstalled and before they
are rebuilt.  But they will work on machines were they were already
installed, and that is the main point with the rename.

> If so, then its not worth the effort to be patching sources in gdal
> to rename the library with 1.3.1 and we can simply call the package
> libgdal1 (not libgdal1-1.3.1).

I believe it is a point in keeping the version number in the library
package name.  It will make it possible to have libgdal1-1.3.1 and
libgdal1-1.3.2 installed in parallel, if for example qgis is still
using the former while mapserver is updated to use the latter.