Re: [RFC] Renaming libnet-1.1.1 to libnet2-1.1.1

From: Dan Kegel <dkegel(at)ixiacom.com>
Date: Wed Mar 05 2003 - 18:25:02 EST

James Ralston wrote:

>>One approach is to rename libnet-1.1.1 to libnet2-1.1.1.  (I'm sure
>>there are many other approaches, but this one seemed obvious.)

>
>
> While I (and others) appreciate your efforts in trying to solve this
> problem, I don't feel that this is the correct solution.
>
> ABIs occasionally change. This is life. (In fact, this is one of the
> reasons why ELF shared libraries have SONAMEs: to indicate ABI
> compatibility, or lack thereof.)
>
> It is the responsibility of the packages which use a particular
> library to support multiple versions of the library.
>
> And in the case of libnet, it's not particularly difficult to patch an
> application to be able to compile with either libnet-1.0 or libnet
> 1.1.
>
> For example, Jon Allen Boone made an official patch for tcptraceroute,
> to make it work with only libnet-1.1 (instead of libnet-1.0). With a
> little #ifdef'ing, and a few autoconf tests, I was able to take Jon's
> patch and produce a patch for tcptraceroute to enable it to compile
> and run against either libnet-1.0 or libnet-1.1. It was fairly
> simple.

For any one app, it may be simple. It's a bit daunting to do that to all the apps that use libnet, though. Surely a migration plan that allowed old apps to build and run unchanged would be better?

> A renaming approach could be used temporarily, until the authors of
> packages which depend on libnet can upgrade their packages to work
> with any version of libnet. But if renaming is to be done, it should
> be the old version of libnet that's renamed, not the new version.
> (I.e., rename libnet-1.0.2a to libnet10-1.0.2a.) Then, at some point
> in the future, the "libnet10" package can simply be dropped, and
> everything will simply use the "libnet" (1.1) package.

Your approach requires apps using libnet-1.0 have to be modified to use the renamed libnet-1.0. However, if you think it's better, I'd be happy to submit a patch for libnet-1.0.2a to rename it to libnet0-1.0.2a (I think Debian is following this scheme, at least partly.) Would that be more acceptable?

In any case, I'd like to come to a generally agreeable conclusion soon, as I have users screaming at me for a way to build both libnet1.0 and libnet1.1 apps.

• Dan

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