On Saturday, February 12, 2011 11:37:29 PM Diego Elio Pettenò wrote: > Il giorno sab, 12/02/2011 alle 18.21 -0500, Mike Frysinger ha scritto: > > patching packages in the tree is a huge hassle, > > you add hassle to end users who d/l random packages and try to build > > things > > themselves, and you make Gentoo non-standard wrt every other distro > > out there. > > What I had in mind was something that would work for upstreams as well, > mostly by having fallback; so if a package supported up to libpng 1.4 it > would search for -lpng14, then -lpng12, then -lpng (and in Gentoo would > hit -lpng14); while one supporting 1.5 as well would go -lpng15 -lpng14 > -lpng12 -lpng ... > > i.e. what most already do for berkdb but at some point with us not > providing -lpng at all, if most upstreams would like that idea. > > But it's still a bit hairy at the moment, I admit it might just not fly.
I consider the berkdb thingy as an example of something not to do rather than a proof of concept. Have you thought about doing something like what was done for wxwidgets ? - an eselect module for out of portage builds - an eclass creating symlinks for libpng.pc/.so in $T and setting the correct -L flag for the linker and PKG_CONFIG_PATH for the .pc ? Not sure if this would work that easily but that's certainly better than updating the version scans in every single package when a new libpng comes out. A.
