Re: gir versioning

[Cosimo Cecchi <cosimoc gnome org>]

On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 4:17 PM, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort <pochu27 gmail com> wrote:

 

I wonder if there's a way to avoid this. Perhaps we could bump the version of the gir whenever the SONAME changes, so that we would have e.g. GnomeDesktop-3.0.typelib for G3.6, but GnomeDesktop-3.8.typelib for G3.8. I'm not quite sure if that would help or not, as I'm not familiar with introspection stuff. The idea is 'encode' the SONAME in the gir too, so that we can a) have multiple versions installed simultaneously, and b) the right version is loaded to avoid cases like this.

Thoughts?

gnome-desktop is not a parallel installable library, and its API/ABI have no stability guarantees...this means that it's not a good idea to install a system-wide version of gnome-desktop different from the rest of GNOME, because things likely won't work. Introspection makes no difference here, but for libraries that have different versions installable in parallel (e.g. GTK 2 and GTK 3) I believe this is already how it works (we generate two different gir/typelibs with different names etc).

Cosimo