libetonyek, odfgen etc packages for ubuntu?

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

On 29 June 2014 20:26, Yue Liu <yue.liu at mail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 11:02 AM, René J.V. <rjvbertin at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sunday June 29 2014 10:42:07 Yue Liu wrote:
>>
>>>http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/calligra-devel/2014-June/011310.html
>>
>> Thanks, I'd already begun to understand that much from the cmake output.
>> The 0.1 libodfgen and 0.10 libwpd versions are still development branches, right? Any idea what happens if I package them up in the most straightforward way - will the previous/stable versions of those libraries be uninstalled, possibly causing problems with applications other than Calligra (LibreOffice for example ...)?
> They are released version. I'm not familiar with package structure on
> Ubuntu. LibreOffice use their own copy of those libraries, only
> software I know of using them other than Calligra is writerperfect.


Thanks for mentioning this. For any dependencies that are for "our
understanding" not mature enough (in term of release management, read:
ABI, API) I recommend having our own copy. You just mentioned
LibreOffice doing similarly.

Bug-free deployment is a #1 value I think.

Some examples, not for complaining but to show what happens if distros
are under-invested:

I am doing this (own copy) in Kexi for mdbtools (which is a mix of
libs and tools and has never been properly packaged) and I have
practiced the same for sqlite (they got some maturity so I stopped but
they still do not have Linux style versioning system and they
recommend copying the code).
In contrast, keeping use of libpqxx as a lib suddenly resulted as
broken openSUSE packages (no support for PostgreSQL in Kexi for
openSUSE). Such accident may happen to anyone "just" because of
something as subtle as dropping support for previous major version of
a library. But we know next major versions of libraries extremely
rarely backward compatible.

Similarly, Kexi dissapeared on gentoo because Qt3Support lib was
marked as no longer supported, for a honest reason, I believe. After
intervention it's said to be quickly fixed _but_ it's after months of
nobody noticing. It was eventually found by me, by accident.

A way out of the trouble may be to allow side-by-side installation of
major versions of libs or allowing internal copies if given lib is
unmaintained or if there's no maintainer interested in extra work.


-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
 Kexi & Calligra & KDE | http://calligra.org/kexi | http://kde.org
 Qt for Tizen | http://qt-project.org/wiki/Tizen
 Qt Certified Specialist | http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek