[fpc-devel] LinkLib Issues In Lazarus and in FPC-2.0.2

[Marco van de Voort]

On Mon, Jul 17, 2006 at 02:35:41PM +0200, Micha Nelissen wrote:
> Marco van de Voort wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 17, 2006 at 01:56:38PM +0200, Micha Nelissen wrote:
> >> the library name correctly according to that distro's packaging rules)
> >> then all dependent software is automatically recompiled for the new
> >> version (and name), and thus no one notices any breakages. Except 3rd
> >> parties like us.
> > 
> > This is not for inbetween releases, since not all software will be
> > automatically recompiled in all cases. 
> 
> Then a lot of users of FreeBSD tracking 6.0 or development, or how you'd
> call it, should have gotten into trouble as well (since there were no
> symlinks) ?

Yes. But probably newer apps depend specifically on the upped version as a
workaround, and not on "a gtk1" as we do. (or worse, we don't depend on gtk
at all) so the amount of other breakage was probably less because of that.

Also this change was at the same time as the importing of libtool (BSD
->libtool GNU libtool), there was a lot of movement already.
 
> > Moreover source and binary packages can be used
> > together (and in practice, are), and there are build clusters (pointy hat)
> > that check this.
> 
> What do they check ?

building all 13000 packages.

> > It only is true for full releases, since that forces all apps to recompile,
> > then we get the heat. But this is also so on Linux, usually we only get the
> > indication that something is wrong when new distro (+version) emerges.
> 
> Mainly I guess because we do not have manpower to check more often :-).

The core infrastructure of everything that is built on top of gcc is brought
into a consistent state by the distro creators before it goes out of the
door. We will never be able to 100% match this. Specially since the
toolchain services are generally very gcc centric, and something else is
usually not even tested.  

For FPC this is not done, so we have to act after the release. 

> Not that I'm saying we should have to check that often...

We would have to have people inside the distro's to do that.