Packaging GTKada 3

[Björn Persson]

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.

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.

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
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/ada/attachments/20140111/70e96a79/attachment.sig>