This is the mail archive of the
cygwin-apps
mailing list for the Cygwin project.
Advice needed on ffcall packaging
- From: Ken Brown <kbrown at cornell dot edu>
- To: cygwin-apps <cygwin-apps at cygwin dot com>
- Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2018 10:47:56 -0500
- Subject: Advice needed on ffcall packaging
- Authentication-results: sourceware.org; auth=none
A few years ago I adopted ffcall (32-bit only) in order to keep it from
disappearing from the distro:
https://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin-apps/2015-07/msg00092.html
The latest upstream release builds on 64-bit Cygwin, so I'd like to
update the package, and I'd like to find a sensible way of breaking it
up into subpackages. Here are the relevant facts:
1. Cygwin's existing (32-bit) ffcall is really a devel package: It
consists of headers, four (static) libs, and documentation. There are
no subpackages and no shared libs. The static libs are
usr/lib/libavcall.a
usr/lib/libcallback.a
usr/lib/libtrampoline.a
usr/lib/libvacall.a
2. The build of the current release produces the same four static libs,
plus shared versions of the first three, plus a new lib, both static and
shared (libffcall.a and cygffcall-0.dll).
If I were starting from scratch, I would have three packages: ffcall,
libffcall0, and libffcall-devel. ffcall would be source only;
libffcall0 would contain the shared libs *.dll; and libffcall-devel
would contain the headers, the import libs *.dll.a, and the one static
lib for which there is no shared version. I wouldn't ship the other
static libs unless I discover later that they're needed for some reason.
But I'm not starting from scratch, and users of the existing ffcall will
need the new libffcall-devel. I can think of two possibilities for
handling this:
A) Pretend that I'm starting from scratch, and deal with the fallout.
There probably won't be any, since ffcall is not currently required by
any other package. As far as I know, its only use is that it's a build
requirement for clisp, which I maintain.
B) Make three packages as above, with the source-only package being
called libffcall instead of ffcall. (libffcall is the upstream name
anyway.) I could then make libffcall-devel obsolete ffcall.
For the record, here's what Fedora does: Until a few months ago, there
was only one package, ffcall, which contained everything. At that time
they created two subpackages, ffcall-devel and ffcall-static.
ffcall-devel corresponds to my proposed libffcall-devel; ffcall-static
contains all the static libs; and plain ffcall more-or-less corresponds
to my proposed libffcall0. This doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Maybe this is much ado about nothing, but I'd appreciate advice.
Ken