[pkg-boost-devel] about the -st/-mt story

[Domenico Andreoli]

Hey, Boost packagers! Are you alive? Steve, Christophe...

This time I need some team brain-storming. So you are called to express
your opinion :)

I don't think this topic is really *that* important, since Debian keeps
any compatibility with upstream and binary compatibility with other
distributions that keep the upstream one.

Its only importance lies in the fact that a lot of users are expecting
something which is not portable, not standard, not documented anywhere.
Something that has been introduced in the Linux world without any common
and shared agreement, which is the practice of linking to Boost libraries
using a short form like -lboost_filesystem in place of the long and
documented way that may be even like -lboost_filesystem-gcc41-mt-1_34

I do not expect great satisfaction about how I am handling this... but
I would like to know if anybody is understanding and (maybe) sharing
my points on the topic, if I am missing any way to solve it, whatever
about it.

A thing I need to show is how poor is the expectation of something like
-lboost_filesystem to work across Linux distributions.  I am trying
to show this with the help of #428419 submitter, which looks unaware
about all this fuss.

For instance, peeking into the Fedora RPM package, I saw that
/usr/lib/libboost_filesystem.so points to the -st variant. It is what
I would expect also from Debian and the exact contrary of what Debian
(me) did before latest upload.

Would you please do a quick check on any other distribution which you
have access to and report back here?

Regards,
Domenico

-----[ Domenico Andreoli, aka cavok
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