On Sun, 28 Oct 2001, Bernd Ernesti wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 24, 2001 at 02:14:05PM -0700, Bill Studenmund wrote:
> [..]
> > I understand why all the library major numbers have to be bumped at once.
> > And I mean like in one CVS commit to both the main tree, the xsrc tree,
> > and pkgsrc.
>
> This is something which I really do NOT like.
>
> NetBSD would be the only system, which has 'every' major library number of
> an external library bumped.
>
> It is currently possible to use the pre compiled binaries and libraries
> from the xfree guys and use it, without using xsrc.
> Thats wouldn't be possible, even worse you have to ask everyone, who has
> a problem, about which libraries or binaries he is using.

With ELF, it should be possible to link against the old libc, even
while developing and selectively linking against the new one, by
adjusting where "libc.so" points to. The typical user would likely
still want to rebuild or upgrade all his shared libraries at nearly
the same time.

> You would also end up with a lot of patches in pkgsrc, for bumping the
> majors of this libraries.
>
> This won't work for the way the current pkgsrc is used in different NetBSD
> versions. The same pkgsrc tree has to work for at least two NetBSD
> releases.
> Let see, we bump the pkgsrc major numbers for a NetBSD release 2.0.
> Someone fetches the current pkgsrc to install it on 1.x and later
> updates to 2.0, .....

Right. We could add a tag to ${BUILD_INFO} (e.g. ${LIBC_VERSION}), and
a mechanism in bsd.pkg.mk to prevent building packages with mixed libc
versions (much like the ${OBJECT_FMT} protection), but again, you'd
still want to upgrade almost everything eventually, with only a few
old binaries (and old libc) hanging around forever.

Frederick