Re: GNOME 1 ABI involving libpng
On Wed, Aug 28, 2002 at 07:24:44 -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> On Wed, 2002-08-28 at 06:15, J.H.M. Dassen (Ray) wrote:
> > So? Let's fix the root cause of that problem then, by having a libpng2-dev
> > package that can coexist with libpng3-dev.
>
> [...]
>
> > - include png(conf).h from /usr/include/png2 rather than /usr/include
> > - link "-lpng2" rather than "-lpng"
>
> Woah, woah. This is a bad idea. These kinds of things have to be done
> upstream. We're not going to patch all of the hundreds of packages
> which use libpng2 to link with -lpng2.
Indeed we're not. The only packages which need to be changed are those that
we as Debian developers (primarily meaning Christian as the maintainer of
the GNOME1 core) feel ought to be buildable on systems that also need
to have libpng3-dev installed. If you look at the patch, libpng2-dev is
left unchanged and is still as (un)usable as it is now.
If you don't care about your packages not being buildable when libpng3-dev
is installed (e.g. you don't have libpng3-dev installed or you build your
packages using sbuild or pbuilder or you don't consider switching between
-dev sets a hassle), you don't have to change anything.
You only need to use libpng2-altdev (and make the changes I listed) if you
want them to be buildable on a system that has libpng3-dev installed.
Altdev packages are a proven solution (see e.g. the libc5 -> libc6
transition) for Debian package maintainers (and in some cases, users) to be
able to build packages against older libraries.
> And besides, people do development with software that's not in Debian; we
> have to provide them with a sane environment.
They can install libpng2-dev or libpng3-dev at their choice and don't have
to care about libpng2-altdev's existance in any way.
Ray
--
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