Subject: Re: Implement versioned names for major libraries to ease upgrade
 process
To: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
References: <86c7a81e-1640-7f82-9e13-dfdbe1aad07b@gmail.com>
 <e0242ec7182e8cf12eae9f14ed142fd25621d780.camel@cogitri.dev>
From: maxice8 <thinkabit.ukim@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <ac326242-d316-ad8b-de62-0b36b919ba7f@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 12 Dec 2020 08:25:13 -0300
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101
 Thunderbird/78.5.1
MIME-Version: 1.0
In-Reply-To: <e0242ec7182e8cf12eae9f14ed142fd25621d780.camel@cogitri.dev>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
Content-Language: en-US
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Hello,

On 12/12/20 7:38 AM, Rasmus Thomsen wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Sat, 2020-12-12 at 06:36 -0300, maxice8 wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Distros like Debian and Void Linux have packages for major version of
>> libraries include the major version in their pkgname (example:
>> libboost1.75).
>>
>> I'd like to implement that for Alpine Linux.
>>
>> ## Benefits to Alpine
>>
>> Ease the upgrade process of major libraries with lots of consumers
>> (like
>> boost that has 127-ish consumers) by allowing 2 or more versions of a
>> library to be installed in parallel.
> 
> Hm, I think the only time users interact with major libraries upgrades
> are on edge or if they upgrade between major versions. As such I don't
> think the effort/maintaince overhead versioned libraries introduce is
> worth it just to not break edge during rebuilds of big packages like
> boost.
> 

I don't think the maintenance effort is that big, there is none in a 
stable release because there is only one major version of the library 
present, the only thing that changes is when you install *foo* it brings 
*lib$VERSION* instead of *lib*.

In edge the old aports would be removed as soon as the upgrade process 
is complete.

> One thing that might be interesting about having versioned names for
> libraries would be that it would make using edge packages on stable
> releases less broken, but if we only do it for major libraries it'd
> still be pretty broken for packages which use un-versioned libraries.
> 

I don't have any plans for mixing edge and stable releases.

>> [...]
>> This is already done for llvm which breaks API and ABI every MAJOR
>> release so we keep llvmN and llvmN+1 and remove llvmN once all
>> packages
>> are switched over to use llvmN+1.
> 
> I think we only do this for LLVM because packages tend to take a long
> time before they switch over to new LLVM versions because it's so much
> effort to stay on top of LLVM effort.
> 

Yes, I meant that we already have basic knowledge in how to implement 
packages with versioning embedded in the pkgname.

Regards
Leo