[Gllug] gtk+ or Qt? (or others?)

[Matthew Kirkwood]

On Mon, 13 May 2002 tet at accucard.com wrote:

> Which reminds me of a long standing problem I have with packaging
> systems. One of the huge benefits of Unix is that it's quite possible
> to have multiple versions of the same library installed concurrently,
> thus avoiding the DLL nightmare found on windows. Sounds great in
> theory, only current packaging systems prevent it!
>
> This leads people like RH, SuSE, etc. to resort to crude workarounds
> like renaming packages (RH ship both glib, and glib10, for example).
> That in turn screws up dependencies for third party packages. Do they
> depend on glib, or glib10? If you put a dependency on glib now, then
> your package may fail on RH8.0 where it'll have been renamed glib12 to
> make room for glib-2.0.

You depend on "libglib-1.2.so" or similar.  That way, if
someone releases glib 1.5 with the name soname (ie. which
happens to be binary compatible) it'll Just Work.  Recent
(ie. for at least the past two years) RPM will do shlib
dependencies for you automatically.

> If packaging systems allowed multiple concurrent versions of the same
> package, then we'd all be far better off.

Actually RPM does, though dpkg doesn't.  But the Debian
convention is to include the version in the package name
from day one, so it doesn't need to change.

Matthew.


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