[pkg-boost-devel] about packaging Boost libraries

[Steve M. Robbins]

Hi Benjamin,


> On Wed, Jul 18, 2007 at 10:24:51AM -0400, Benjamin Kosnik wrote:
 
> > Is this issue (or are there issues?) in the debian bug tracker, or on a
> > mailing list? 

Domenico gave you the links, but let me summarize the issue briefly:

(1) Boost decorates each library filename with build characteristics
such as compiler, thread model, debug symbols, etc.  This leads to
monstrosities like libboost_filesystem-gcc41-mt-1_34.so.

(2) Such library names that change with each compiler change, for
example, are a nuisance for boost-using code authors as they vary from
system to system and are hard to autodetect.  So Debian was shipping
a convenience symbolic link of the form libboost_filesystem.so.  We chose
to symlink this to the multi-threaded version.

(3) The last upload of boost to Debian removed the convenience link on
the grounds that it might surprise some authors to be linking to a
multi-threaded version of the library.  Moreoever, it doesn't help out
authors of single-threaded apps in any way -- they are still faced with
the filenames of (1).

(4) We didn't communicate the change of (3) very well and surprised many
other package maintainers with broken builds.


So the issue at hand is: can the linux distributors get together and
come up with some way to ease the burden on boost-using code authors
-- the autodetection problem mentioned in (2).

Cheers,
-Steve
Another, mainly inactive, Debian boost maintainer.
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