testing 'make install'

[Andy Dougherty]

On Tue, 20 Jan 2009, chromatic wrote:

> On Tuesday 20 January 2009 11:08:40 Andy Dougherty wrote:
> 
> > I don't see anything in here about supporting different versions.  Any
> > idea how that's going to work?  For stand-alone installations, of course,
> > different versions can be installed completely separately, something like
> > --prefix=/opt/parrot-0.8.2 (though that really needs my previous rpath
> > patch to be useful) but for the various Linux distributions that may
> > someday want to have both (say) parrot-1.0 and parrot-1.5 simultaneously
> > installed under /usr, what's the plan?
> 
> It'd be nice to take advantage of shared library versioning, at least on 
> platforms where the compiler and linker and dynamic loader all support it -- 
> but I have no idea how to do that in a cross-platform way.  Do you think it's 
> possible?

Maybe, but it'd need experts from each new platform to adapt.  I never 
really learned that stuff.  I do note that I can find very few examples of 
using shared library versioning in any deep way.  For example, on my 
Debian system, I have both python2.4 and python2.5 packages installed, and 
what I get in /usr/lib is:

    /usr/lib/libpython2.4.so.1.0
    /usr/lib/libpython2.5.so.1.0

I also recall some wonkiness with linking directly against a particular 
version of a shared library.  In the perl 5 Configure world, the relevant 
variable is ignore_versioned_solibs.  It is set for Linux, Symbian, and 
recent Solaris, but unset for everyone else.  (It's ignored for Windows 
and VMS.)

Anyway, I suspect that if you can get something working under Linux, 
Darwin, and Windows, it'll probably be general enough (or easy enough to 
generalize) to work elsewhere as needed.

Much more importantly, however, I was also wondering about all the other 
stuff installed with 'make install'.  I'd expect they'll evolve along with 
parrot, so that, for example, the version of PGE.pbc included with 
parrot-1.0 might well differ from that included with parrot-1.5.

-- 
    Andy Dougherty		doughera at lafayette.edu