Re: Java policy proposals

[Marcus Better <marcus@better.se>]

Matthew Johnson wrote:
>    - #363165 mentions the version number in jar names. The parallel with C
>      libraries is .so name.

No, our version numbers are very different - they are upstream release
numbers, whereas sonames are ABI versions.

>      When compiling the symlink is use and at 
>      runtime the versioned symbol is used.
>      could be adopted by Java; packaging tools should be able to set the
>      Class-Path attribute to whichever version the symlink is currently
>      pointing to.

I think this would be very nice, _if_ we could solve it for ABI versioning.
If we did this using the upstream version numbers, we would be creating
hard dependencies on specific versions, which would be a disaster.

(The current situation is of course also really dangerous - we just package
any version and hope it will be compatible for all dependent packages
forever. When something breaks we notice that a library needs to be
updated, so we update it and hope the update doesn't break more stuff...)
      
>      This is, of course, only useful if a change in version number
>      indicates an incompatible version and you can have multiple versions
>      installed at once.

We can only have multiple upstream versions in the archive if there are ABI
changes and both are needed.

Cheers,

Marcus