Re: Package naming convention and contents

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin at cygwin dot com>]

Hi David,

On Jul  8 20:06, David Stacey wrote:
> I am preparing a library package called Poco. Whilst Marco gave me a
> GTG, both he and Ken were a little unsure about the package names
> that I had used. Please could some of you good folk give me a little
> guidance in this matter.
> 
> At the moment, I have tried to copy the naming convention used by
> our 'boost' package, as Poco is similar in its layout and intended
> usage. I have a source package (poco-1.4.6p1-1.src.tar.bz2) that
> builds the following:
> 
> 
> libpoco1.4.6
>   - Several versioned libraries, e.g. cygPocoData_1_4_6.dll.
>   - A couple of unversioned executables.
> 
> libpoco-devel
>   - Header files and libs to link against Poco.
> 
> libpoco-doc
>   - HTML documentation.
> 
> poco-debuginfo
>   - Debug files, generated by cygport.
> 
> 
> The contentious package is the first one. The point of having
> versioned library files is that you can have any number of them
> installed side-by-side (if you'll forgive the Microsoftism). In that
> way, some other package will always pull in the exact version of
> Poco that it was linked against. For that reason, the two
> unversioned executables don't belong here, and I should probably
> move them into a package simply called 'poco'. However, unless
> there's an API breakage, versioned libraries shouldn't be necessary.
> 
> Then there's the name of the package itself. This could have been
> 'libpoco', 'libpoco1', or 'libpoco1.4'. The first of these is
> probably wrong, as there is some intention to release Poco 2.x at
> some point that will require a C++11 compliant compiler. Hence,
> we'll may want to support Poco 1.x for a while. Reading the change
> log, it appears that API changes can come in at any release.

I had hoped somebody else would reply here since I'm a bit fuzzy on the
library naming schemes.

Basically versioning is good.  If the project uses libtool, you get a
unique version number usually, see, for instance, the libncurses
packages (libncurses7, libncurses8, libncurses9, libncurses10).  The
name of the package reflects the version number of the DLL
(cygncurses-7.dll, cygncurses-8.dll, cygncurses-9.dll, cygncurses-10.dll.

If the package does not use libtool, you should ideally go with what the
upstream maintainers go with.  How are the libraries versioned on Linux,
for instance?

I just installed the Fedora "poco-foundation" package, which contains
only the shared lib, on Fedora 19.  F19 has poco 1.4.2 and the shared
lib is called libPocoFoundation.so.11.  A look into the source package
shows that the number is noted in a file called "libversion".  The build
process seems to make sure that the shared library get that number, and,
looking into the sources I can see this:

  build/rules/global:  LIBVERSION := $(shell cat $(POCO_BASE)/libversion)
  */Makefile:          target_version = $(LIBVERSION)
  build/config/CYGWIN: SHAREDLIBEXT     = .$(target_version).dll

Apart from a wrong assumption in the build/config/CYGWIN file in terms
of strip(1), which is unrelated, I don't understand why your lib isn't
called cygPocoFoundation.11.dll.  Naturally the libray package name
would be libpoco11.  Or, following the Linux lead, the package name
could be poco-foundation-11.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer                 cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat