How about major and minor releases

[Havoc Pennington]

On Wed, 2003-09-24 at 09:04, Bill Anderson wrote:
> I had 1.5 and 2.x installed in parallel, no problems. The problem I had
> lied in the fact that RH's python-based tools called /usr/bin/python.
> When added python2, I edited the RH python tools to run
> /usr/bin/python1.5 instead and merrily went on my way. Indeed, those
> systems are *still* running that way w/o issue. :)

Yes, but a working upstream parallel install setup would mean you didn't
have to change any tools, it should all just keep working. ;-)

Look at how GTK is set up; it installs to names with version number in
them, and all apps compiling vs. GTK always include the version number
in the library name they ask for. If we added GTK+ 3 today with a
different ABI, no changes whatsoever would be required to GTK+ 2 or any
of the apps using it.

If Python punts this to the distribution or local installation, then
either we have to name things in nonstandard ways and get flamed for
changing the upstream ABI, or we have to break the ABI shipped with the
distribution in order to move to the unmodified upstream ABI.

The basic reason people don't do parallel install is simply that they
think "/usr/bin/python2" looks ugly compared to "/usr/bin/python"

Would it make sense to have a symlink /usr/lib/libimageloader.so that
pointed to libjpeg prior to some date and libpng after some date? That's
what you're doing if you take an existing executable name and make it
refer to an incompatible executable. "Just partially incompatible"
doesn't matter, apps don't "just partially crash" when they try to use
it.

Havoc