[Pkg-vala-maintainers] Bug#564088: lua5.1.pc / lua5.1.vapi

[Enrico Tassi]

Package: valac
Version: 0.7.9-1
Severity: normal

Hi,
  first, as (the other) Enrico said, thanks for maintaining a great
project like vala, I've never been so happy with an OO-language! 

I maintain Lua, and I have few words to say about the issue. 

First of all, let me spell out the original sin: the upstream ships a
lua.pc in the etc/ directory of the tarball, so that maintainers are
temped to use it without renaming it. 

This is inconvenient, since, for example, the Lua 5.0 and Lua 5.1
interpreters are not API/ABI compatible in the C side, and also the Lua
language itself is slightly different. Thus linking to the right version
is important, moreover both versions of the language are widespread
according to popcon, and have many reverse dependencies, thus both have
to be part of the Debian archive.

I agree with Enrico, the right fix seems to rename the .vapi file to
match the .pc file, but making such change in the Debian package would
make applications written in vala not compilable with the same --pkg
switch (since other distributions may ship lua.pc/lua.vapi). Thus I'd
like the issue to be pushed upstream, if possible. 

A symbolic link (for the .vapi or the .pc file) is another possible
solution, but is more fragile, since updating the symlink to a newer Lua
version (even if the .vapi is updated) will just break the compilation
of softwares, and not tell the authors of such softwares that the bound
Lua version in the .vapi file has changed and they have to update the
code, while having different .vapi for different Lua versions may ease
updating their softwares, or allow different Lua versions to be
supported at the same time (the Lua release cycle is way slower than the
Debian one, thus vala upstreams will not be forced to track a moving
target, and minor updates e.g. lua5.1.3 -> lua5.1.4 are ABI compatible).

Could you inform the upstreams about this issue?

Cheers  

-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-trunk-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages valac depends on:
ii  libc6                         2.10.2-4   Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libglib2.0-0                  2.22.3-2   The GLib library of C routines
ii  libglib2.0-dev                2.22.3-2   Development files for the GLib lib
ii  libvala0                      0.7.9-1    C# like language for the GObject s

valac recommends no packages.

valac suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information

-- 
Enrico Tassi