Jack Eidsness wrote:
> 1) installing two different versions did not create a conflict; this
> could be considered handy, if you had some reason to link to two
> different versions of the library, but I think that's kind of far
> fetched.
This was done on purpose. You need multiple versions of the library
installed when you have binaries linked against one version of the
library, then upgrade the library, then build more binaries without
updating the old ones. This happens frequently outside the pure open
source world.
A patch to change this will be rejected, with prejudice.
> More likely, it gave us some difficult-to-detect bugs, but I'm not
> completely sure.
I could see that happening if you install an older version of the
library alongside a newer one, in that order. Then, the old library
blasts the new one's .so symlink, which is probably not what you wanted.
The solution to this is better management of the symlink.
> 2) doing rpm -Uvh new.i386.rpm ... deleted the symbolic link without
> recreating it. honestly, that seems like a bug, to me, in the upgrade
> process to run %postun for the old version before doing %post for the
> new one.
I agree. This one I'll happily accept patches for. I just hadn't
gotten around to fixing it myself.
In light of my guess at the source of your problems above, such a patch
should probably be smart enough to realize when the symlink already
exists and points to a newer version of the library. In that case, it
shouldn't disturb it. Otherwise, it adds it regardless of whether it
existed already or not.
> What do you think is wrong with writing a patch for the Makefile (i
> presume to add -soname to the gcc options)?
The problem is that we don't use Makefiles, directly. They're all
generated from mysql++.bkl, by the Bakefile tool. Since the purpose of
using Bakefile is to abstract away platform differences, it would have
to be an awfully special patch for me to accept it.
I would be much happier if you detected the availability of this option
in the autoconf stage. See the thread library detection stuff for ideas
of how to accomplish this.
