Re: [Chicken-users] no soname

[Jim Ursetto]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 3:18 AM, felix winkelmann <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 9:27 PM, Ivan Raikov <address@hidden> wrote:
>>   This means that we cannot have a Debian package for Chicken 4,
>> because Debian insists on having a soname version, so that it can do
>> things like installing libchicken 3 and 4 alongside each other.

> I wonder what's the point of enforcing use of soname, if (for example)
> header-files are usually not versioned. What if you want to install
> a chicken.h 3 and 4 alongside each other?

Debian versions the header files etc. in package-specific directories
(example: /usr/include/python2.5 and /usr/include/python2.6), but
dumps all public libraries in /usr/lib. For python it seems to use a
dummy soname and change the basename of the library --
/usr/lib/libpython2.4.so and libpython2.5.so.  You could perhaps argue
for a special case exception: that libchicken is a private library of
sorts and deserves to live in a versioned directory.  Or request the
soname be allowed to remain blank and version the library basename
itself, e.g. /usr/lib/libchicken4.so, libchicken3.3.so.  The latter
would require some tweaks to csc.  Just a thought.