Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: libpng-1.5 smooth upgrade

[Mike Frysinger]

On Monday, February 14, 2011 10:37:27 Alexis Ballier wrote:
> On Saturday, February 12, 2011 11:37:29 PM Diego Elio Pettenò wrote:
> > Il giorno sab, 12/02/2011 alle 18.21 -0500, Mike Frysinger ha scritto:
> > > patching packages in the tree is a huge hassle,
> > > you add hassle to end users who d/l random packages and try to build
> > > things themselves, and you make Gentoo non-standard wrt every other
> > > distro out there.
> >
> > What I had in mind was something that would work for upstreams as well,
> > mostly by having fallback; so if a package supported up to libpng 1.4 it
> > would search for -lpng14, then -lpng12, then -lpng (and in Gentoo would
> > hit -lpng14); while one supporting 1.5 as well would go -lpng15 -lpng14
> > -lpng12 -lpng ...
> >
> > i.e. what most already do for berkdb but at some point with us not
> > providing -lpng at all, if most upstreams would like that idea.
> >
> > But it's still a bit hairy at the moment, I admit it might just not fly.
>
> I consider the berkdb thingy as an example of something not to do rather
> than a proof of concept.
>
> Have you thought about doing something like what was done for wxwidgets ?

i dont think that model is appropriate either.  wxwidgets maintains parallel 
version branches.  libpng does not.

> - an eselect module for out of portage builds

generally if an eselect module is necessary, that says to me that something 
more fundamental is broken.
-mike