Re: CERN root

["Kevin B. McCarty" <kmccarty@Princeton.EDU>]

Hi Ricardo,

Sorry for the long delay in replying, I was without email access over
Christmas break.

On 12/20/2004 11:01 PM, Ricardo Yanez wrote:

> This is not the first time we read each other. To answer your
> question... yes, I started with the scripts you mention to create the
> debian directory (archaic if you believe the revision logs). As you say,
> they are non-working. To make the story short, the --enable-pthread
> option had to be removed because it prevented us from compiling within
> root (cint) the data reading and analysis codes. I'm guessing a conflict
> between the pthread dev files included in the root source and the one
> part of the debian system.

Interesting.  One other thing I thought of in the meantime is the
question of the library ABI backwards compatibility.  Are the ROOT
authors aware of the importance of preserving library ABI compatibility,
and especially the difficulty in doing so when using C++?  The shared
libraries they create don't have any version numbering, so I'm a little
leery here...

Does it make more sense to have the ROOT shared libs be in a separate
directory /usr/lib/root, or dump them into /usr/lib with everything
else?  If the libraries have an ABI that constantly changes
incompatibly, it would be best to have them separate, but then you have
to make special provisions ($LD_LIBRARY_PATH or whatever) for linked
binaries.  Plus you still have to recompile linked binaries with every
new incompatible version of ROOT...

I don't know the answer to these questions myself, but they'll be
important things to consider in packaging ROOT, even if only for a small
private set of users due to the licensing issues.

regards,

-- 
Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@princeton.edu>   Physics Department
WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/    Princeton University
GPG public key ID: 4F83C751                 Princeton, NJ 08544