Packaging GTKada 3

[pavel at zhukoff.net]

Quoting Björn Persson <bjorn at rombobjörn.se>:

> I'm investigating how GTKada 3 can be packaged in Fedora. These are my
> current thoughts on the matter:
>
> GTK+ 3 contains many API changes, and so does GTKada 3. Packages
> currently in Fedora require GTKada 2 and can't simply be recompiled
> with GTKada 3. There may also be users I don't know about who need
> GTKada 2. Therefore I think we need to ship both versions for at least
> a few Fedora releases.
>
Do we have many packages which depend on GtkAda. I *think* gnatcoll  
should be recompilled with v3 (not sure tbh).

> Unlike GTK+, GTKada has no support for installing two versions side by
> side, other than dumping the entire directory tree under some
> nonstandard prefix and requiring users to mess with various environment
> variables. Despite the API incompatibilities, both versions use the
> filenames "gtkada.gpr", "gtkada-config" and "gtkada.pc".
>
> Theoretically I could hack the build system to change various filenames
> from "gtkada" to "gtkada3", but that would be a lot of trouble and
> would make Fedora incompatible with everything that uses GTKada. Both
> developers and packagers would have to do special things to select the
> right version of the library.
>
> I think I'll make a new package named GtkAda3, and allow it to use
> mostly the same filenames as the existing package GtkAda. The binary
> libraries will be parallel-installable because their filenames are
> versioned, but the -devel packages will conflict. A program using
> GTKada 3 will coexist peacefully with one using GTKada 2, and building
> packages in Koji or Mock will work as each package will pull in either
> GtkAda or GtkAda3 but not both. Only developers who want to program for
> both versions of GTKada at once will have a problem. They will have to
> install at least one of the libraries elsewhere in the filesystem and
> mess with environment variables as Adacore expects them to do.

Is it possible to use something like alternativities for it? It should  
be able to maintain symlinks... Or both GtkAda2.x and GtkAda3.x cans  
provide GtkAda (more usefull packages is more preffered).

>
> There are no Gnome bindings in GTKada 3. The OpenGL bindings and the
> GTK.Extra widgets don't compile, so it looks like those will be left
> out of the package, at least initially.

>
> Björn Persson


-- 
Pavel