Hi all,
If you're thinking of packaging hexter 0.6.0 for your
favorite distribution, please wait for version 0.6.1.
I've been talking with Anthony Green about his efforts
to package hexter 0.6.0 for Fedora, and it seems I made
a mistake.
hexter 0.6.0 can sound radically different from hexter 0.5.9,
depending on the patch used, and I didn't want anyone's
existing projects to break if they upgraded. So I changed
the way hexter 0.6.0 installs: it installs as hexter6.so, while
hexter 0.5.9 installs as hexter.so, so the two versions can
coexist.
This works well enough for people who install from source,
but Anthony pointed out that this makes things difficult for
people packaging hexter for distributions. For most distros,
when one upgrades, the old files are removed, meaning
hexter.so would disappear and existing projects would
break. Distros with something akin to Gentoo's SLOT
mechanism can have multiple versions installed
simultaneously, but the majority of hexter users will have
no need for anything but the latest version.
What I'm going to do with version 0.6.1 instead is make
it install as hexter.so, just like 0.5.x versions, and add
a configuration option which will optionally make it sound
like 0.5.9. Problem solved: existing projects can easily
be made to sound like they originally did, and everyone
can have the latest and greatest hexter installed.
Expect 0.6.1 sometime this coming week. Thanks,
Sean Bolton
