Re: Plugin versioning?

[David Lebel <lebel@lebel.org>]

Quoting Christian Weisgerber (naddy@mips.inka.de):
> Versioning modules is a pain in the sphincter.  Apart from patching
> the Makefiles, the code that does the loading needs to be fixed.
> And since version schemes vary among unices, and I don't know of
> a way to interface this with libtool, the resulting patches aren't
> portable and can't be submitted back.
> 
> Discuss.

Well, you asked us to discuss, so here is my 2 cents (Canadian, which
isn't worth much these days) about the subject;  my opinion here is that
most "plugin'ified" ports handle the versioning by putting all their
files in a "version-ed" subdirectory.  zsh comes to mind here, even
though the current snapshot don't enable the modularization, it could
and they put their plugins inside a ${V} directory, so its quite
possible to have two different version at the same time (forgiving the
fact that we would have to conflicting hard links in the 'zsh' binary
name).

I prefer that way than adding version information in the .so themselves,
since it requires substantially less fiddling in the code and most
applications already comes with that sort of scheme built-in. 

When this is all done and said, I really think we shouldn't play with
this at all; unless it adds more than the ability to have two version at
the same time (which is quite a rare case).  Also, we should try and see
what packages we are talking about, and at first, try to take this issue
port by port.

Ciao,
  ...David

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