Hi all, I'm running into users with problems in MonoDevelop that are caused by Debian's changes to Mono.Addins pkgconfig files that directhex tells me are a consequence of Debian packaging policies.
Debian's packaging has taken the mono-addins.pc file, and renamed it to mono-addins-0.2.pc, then created a symlink from mono-addins.pc to mono-addins-0.2.pc. This confuses MD users, because MD won't use both pkgconfig "names" for the same dll, so MD sometimes switches the package names in the project files. It's arguably not a MD bug because there's likely no sane way to pick the "correct" one when scanning, and MD uses the real dll names and versions when resolving refs - the package names are mostly hints. Notes that we are tracking this at https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=494206 The real problem is more fundamental. A pkgconfig *filename* is essentially a handle that MonoDevelop, xbuild, Makefiles and other build systems can use. The new pc name "mono-addins-0.2" that Debian has made up is not *portable* to other distros. For example, say a user on Debian creates a makefile that uses `pkgconfig --libs mono-addins-0.2`, and someone else tries to run it on openSUSE or Fedora. It won't work. As well as breaking things, this change is currently pointless, as there has been no ABI break in mono.addins since it became stable. The "mono-addins" name refers to the current ABI. If Mono.Addins breaks ABI, we can then switch to another name, e.g. "mono-addins-2", which will work across distros while solving the ABI issue Debian's policy is trying to solve. I've cc'd the mail to mono-packagers-list so that other distros' packagers are aware of the issues that doing things like this could cause. -- Michael Hutchinson http://mjhutchinson.com -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
