[Pkg-octave-devel] Bugs in octave2.1

[John W. Eaton]

On  2-Jan-2009, Thomas Weber wrote:

| On Fri, Jan 02, 2009 at 02:10:14PM -0500, John W. Eaton wrote:
| > On  2-Jan-2009, Thomas Weber wrote:
| > 
| > | I'm reluctant about #367165. Putting the libraries into /usr/lib means
| > | we need a SONAME. Octave doesn't version the SONAME currently. I've
| > | looked into this quite some time ago, but we would need to introduce
| > | both automake and libtool into Octave. That would be a huge patch,
| > | touching about every Makefile.
| > 
| > Why would we have to use automake and libtool to handle SONAME?
| 
| Uh, I thought libtool is the canonical way to handle SONAMEs with
| autoconf? 
| 
| automake came into the game as the libtool manual relies heavily on it.
| >From libtool's manual:
| "If you want to use libtool in a regular Makefile (or Makefile.in), you
| are on your own."
| http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/libtool.html#Makefile-rules
| 
| Just to get this clear, I'd love to have versioned SONAMEs with Octave,
| it would make transitions a lot easier. But I simply don't have the
| knowledge to go that deep into Octave's build process.

With GNU ld, I think all you need to do is use the -soname=NAME
option.  Adding that to the Octave build process should be fairly
simple.  I think the hard part is doing the right thing when the
internals change.  Currently, we don't care much.  Each new version of
Octave comes with a new set of libraries and we only have a weak
promise about compatibility with any previous versions.

jwe