Neal Becker wrote:
Patrick Hartling wrote:
Neal Becker wrote:
Patrick Hartling wrote:
[snip]
Since there are likely to be many users who are expecting Boost to be installed using the Red Hat RPM, I have added some compatibility bits in the form of two extra RPMs called boost-symlinks and boost-devel-symlinks. The first installs symlinks for the Boost libraries named using Red Hat's stripped down convention (with the version number after the .so part of the name). The second RPM installs unversioned symbolic links to the fully qualified library names and to the Boost header directory. The idea here is that users could have multiple Boost developer installations in parallel, and if they so desired, they could install this extra RPM with unversioned names to point to whichever Boost installation should be the "default" version. Since the symlinks are unversioned, parallel installations of multiple versions of these RPMs is not possible. Nevertheless, the two together provide a means to make a Boost RPM installation that is compatible with what Red Hat has been distributing for quite a while now.
Comments?
-Patrick
I have taken some similar approach. I put includes in a parallel dir, but I also put libs in a parallel dir. This prevents any conflicts. If you do this, you don't need a seperate symlink package, right? Yes, that is true. I didn't notice that detail in your spec file. That is certainly an interesting idea since ldconfig should take care of extending the default search path, right?
Not sure what you mean by ldconfig extending search path. ldconfig can be told about new search path. In recent fedoras, we have /etc/ld.so.conf.d. All you need to do is have your rpm drop a file in this directory, and search path is extended.
I was referring to ldconfig being told about directories other than the trusted set so that users do not have to set/extend $LD_LIBRARY_PATH in order to find shared libraries that are not in those directories. I know that that's how it works on FreeBSD. It isn't clear to me from the ldconfig man page on Enterprise Linux 4 that the Linux version does the same thing, but I think it must in order for things such as the Qt libraries to be found without extra effort on the part of the user.
Since Redhat will produce %{_libdir}/libboost_regex.so.1.33.1 and so might you, don't you have to use a different libdir? My intention was to produce RPMs that can be used in place of those from Red Hat while still providing the same file names and directory structure for people who want that. Personally, I want to use the fully qualified library names because it facilitates parallel installations so well. This is important for my company's goals since we want to install long-lived software on customers' computers and be able to make easy patches/upgrades along the way. If the focus changes such that this spec file is for making a Boost installation that can live along side the one made by Red Hat, then several aspects of the spec file would change.
So, the suggestion is that redhat will produce e.g., %{_libdir}/libboost_regex.so.1.33.1 and that the proposed package will also produce %{_libdir}/libboost_regex.so.1.33.1, so they will conflict? Maybe I misunderstood. AFAIK, a parallel install is the way to go.
Yes, installing boost-symlinks would conflict with the boost RPM that Red Hat makes. My intention, however, is to replace the Red Hat RPM, rather than to live alongside it. The -symlinks packages are to provide a means to be compatible with the naming used by the RPM used by Red Hat. Ultimately, what I would prefer to see is Red Hat using an installation scheme for Boost that more closely follows the model that Boost uses, but I do not know that anyone else necessarily feels that way. Certainly, in the time that Red Hat has been distributing Boost with Enterprise Linux and Fedora Core, they must not have gotten many--if any--reports of people wanting the Boost packaging to change. -Patrick -- Patrick L. Hartling | VP Engineering, Infiscape Corp. PGP: http://tinyurl.com/2oum9 | http://www.infiscape.com/