how to handle a gui- and non-gui-version of the same library/soname

[Al Dunsmuir]

Hello Milos,

Monday, January 18, 2010, 2:27:22 PM, you wrote:
> is there any good way how to handle the situation described at
>
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=528524
>
> ?
>
> I.e. you have a single library (single soname) which can be compiled
> with or without GUI support (with different ABI) -- and we'd like to
> have both of them, of course -- the non-GUI version on headless servers,
> the GUI one for desktop.
>
> As far "yelling at upstream" sounds like the most correct way.

I'd  suggest  that  the  proper  solution would be to separate the GUI
functions  into  a  separate  library with a separate-but-related soname,
and have that library depend on the non-GUI library.

That  way the final GUI tools would depend on both libraries, and the
equivalent command line tools only on the non-GUI library.

If possible, common functions should use shared code hosted in the non-GUI
library.  Otherwise you could get different  results  from  the slightly
different code in the two libraries.  These lead to "it works if I do it by
A1, but fails with  A2"  bug reports.

From this user's POW, it gets more insane if A1 and A2 are the same tool
that supports running in GUI and command line modes.

Al