Proposal to (formally/easily) allowing multiple versions of the same library installable

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 02/16/2015 05:10 PM, Martyn Foster wrote:
>
>
> On 16 February 2015 at 15:12, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at
> <mailto:kevin.kofler at chello.at>> wrote:
>
>     Christopher Meng wrote:
>     > Maintaining several version of the same library is not easy as you think,
>     > basically once a developer wants to install version X while then another
>     > people want to deploy things based on version Y, how to crack this nut?
>     > You can't just care about runtime.
>
>     Then you need to patch one or the other package to work with the same
>     version. Only if that is not possible, a compatibility library can be
>     considered. But we should always first try to make everything work
>     with the
>     same version (if possible, the newer one).
>
>
> The requirement to work with multiple versions of a package come up in
> the scientific/HPC community very frequently. Its not always about API
> compatibility, sometimes exact numerical reproduction is required which
> isn't preserved even between minor versions (i.e. an OS update).
I don't buy this argument wrt. Fedora.

Fedora is a rapid moving, forward looking distro, in which such 
regressions should be fixed and not be worked around by compat-libs.

Ralf