Problems with packages depending on libguile

[Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>]

I'm contacting each of you because you're listed as maintaining a
package in stable, unstable, or testing that depends on libguile, and
the latest upload of libguile will probably break your packages.  The
problem is that the original libguile6 contained

  libqthreads.so.0*
  libguilereadline.so.0*

i.e. the upstream maintainers didn't version these libs, and so when
they released guile1.4, libguile9 still provided

  libqthreads.so.0*
  libguilereadline.so.0*

This was about the time I inherited the guile packages, and while not
versioning these libs was technically, "bad", it wasn't fatal because
the libguile6 and libguile9 versions were compatible with each other,

So to deal with this and make dpkg happy, I added a "Replaces:
libguile6" to libguile9 which mostly worked.  Meanwhile, I worked on
the guile source and talked to the upstream maintainers and we decided
that these two helper libs would just be versioned the same as
libguile.

So the latest release of libguile9 provides

  libqthreads.so.9*
  libguilereadline.9*

Of course installing this package left the libqthreads.so.0* symlinks
from libguile6 dangling.  To fix that, I added a "Conflicts:
libguile6" to libguile9.  This also helped with my intention to remove
guile1.3 from Debian and have everything migrate to 1.4.

However, there's now a problem.  If you upgrade the current libguile9,
and you had already installed the libguile9 that just "Replaced"
libguile6, all of the packages that are linked against libguile6 or
libguile9 will break.  This is because they were linked against
libqthreads.so.0* and friends and those files' libguile6 versions were
replaced by libguile9, and then libguile9 quit including them in favor
of the new *so.9* versions.

This needs to be fixed.  I'm not sure what the best solution is, but
my current question is whether or not just having you all build/upload
new versions of your packages would solve the problem.  I *think* what
we need is new versions of your packages that "Depend: libguile9 (>=
1:1.4-7), which is exactly what the current libguile9 shilbs file
specifies.  Does this seem reasonable, and likely to fix the problem?

Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks.

-- 
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930