[Geany-devel] Geany-Plugins Dependency Consolidation

[Colomban Wendling]

Hi Matthew,

Le 04/08/2012 04:59, Matthew Brush a écrit :
> Since some plugins share dependencies, is there some way to coordinate
> both the versions of the dependencies and the build system? For example
> if Debugger and MultiTerm both depend on LibVTE, to make sure they use
> compatible API versions and depend on the same version. I'm thinking
> it's not great to require LibFoo v0.01 for one plugin and LibFoo v0.02
> for another, even if they (can) use common API (and probably do already).
> 
> I guess it's more of a build system question, is it realistic?
> 
> Common/interesting dependencies based on a quick scan of the `build`
> directory:
> 
> [...]
> 
> For most of the dependencies, I think the GEANY_CFLAGS/GEANY_LIBS would
> cover it (gtk, glib, gio(?), gmodule, gthread, etc.). For the others
> maybe there could be some tweaking of versions to at least make the
> dependency versions the same. I know for my two plugins (DevHelp and
> MultiTerm) the versions of the dependencies are not very much of a
> concern and I mostly copied existing plugins' .m4 files.
> 
> Just a few thoughts I had while mucking around with the build system.

I'm not sure I understand your concern.  Dependencies should reflect
what's needed for the package (here, the plugin) to build/run or
whatever.  Since all libraries either keep backward API compatibility or
make it possible to have both version at the same time [1] (either by
changing name/including major version in it or by following common rules
about versionning (see Libtool Versionning in your favorite manual)), I
don't see chat can be the problem.

If you have library X in version 64, and have plugin A depend on version
>= 21 and plugin B on version >= 50, both are happy.  If you had version
42 of the library, only plugin A would have built.  Nobody expects you
to install version 21 AND version 50 of the library.

So honestly I don't see what your concern is.  If plugin A can work with
version 21 of the library X but plugin B uses new stuff that is only
available since version 50, I don't see why we should either prevent
plugin A to accept version < 50 or plugin B to use that new API.

For GTK2 or GLib, we might want to ask authors whether they can stick to
a particular version, e.g. to the same version Geany requires so
hopefully one could always have the plugins if they have Geany -- unless
they depend on another library.  But IMO that's a special case for these
two libraries Geany also uses, and I don't even think that we should
really prevent one to depend on a newer version of GTK2 if they want a
feature from it.


So... maybe I got your point wrong, but I don't think it's any kind of a
problem to have different dependencies from one plugin to another --
actually, I think each plugin should set it dependencies to exactly what
it needs: nothing less (of course), and nothing more.


Regards,
Colomban


[1] or you just have to kill their author and/or your distributor... :(