On Sun, 12 Nov 2006, Hamish wrote:
Francesco P. Lovergine wrote:Also having a better management of libraries would be nice. Libtool could be complex but not evil as having no versioned libraries at all. AFAIK there is not anything that can be defined a 'grass library' with a stable versioned API.this post from a week ago may be of interest: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.grass.devel/16481/
Aha - so perhaps Markus or whoever added the version numbering into the library names did it because of Debian? I still don't think it's necessary because if a user has more than one GRASS version installed at once they are put in different directories.
IIUC is it true that the reason for making this fuss over version numbering and file locations is that Debian wants to install GRASS files in various places distributed across the system filesystem, rather than all one place? This is not a design assumption that has been made and would be a rather huge and pointless job to fix anyway - almost every part of GRASS assumes there is a $GISBASE directory under which the whole system is contained.
That's not to say it doesn't comply with a convention: the GRASS installation directory is (as I understand it) like a /opt-style directory, an add-on software package that includes its whole system under there, and the system-specific startup script (which really just contains the path to the GRASS installation directory) goes in /usr/local/bin. Neat and tidy. And different GRASS versions can be installed in different directories and have different startup scritps. I really think that is quite a simple and convenient solution the way it is? Well as Hamish says some things could be tidied, but not worth changing it just for the sake of it I think.
Paul