[vtkusers] VTK on Tcl 8.6 and with re-locatable TCL files, and more

[Denis Barbier]

On 2008/10/21 Sebastien BARRE wrote:
> At 10/17/2008 02:03 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
[...]
>> That patch also does something else useful: it makes it look for
>>        libvtkFOO.so.5.2
>> rather than
>>        libvtkFOO.so
>> on Mandriva (and probably other distributions), the unversioned .so
>> files usually go in -devel packages.
>
> We can't change that behavior either for backward compatibility reasons.
> Libraries are indeed versioned already, (you should have in your build tree
> something like libvtkCommon.so, symlink to libvtkCommon.so.5.2, symlink to
> libvtkCommon.so.5.2.0, etc);

Out of curiosity, how can this change break backward compatibility?
Adam is right, tcl scripts should look for versioned libraries, maybe an analogy
here would help: this pkgIndex.tcl stuff is a loader, and
  $ ldd /usr/bin/vtk
        linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xb7f1e000)
        libvtkVolumeRenderingTCL.so.5.0 =>
/usr/lib/libvtkVolumeRenderingTCL.so.5.0 (0xb7edb000)
        libvtkWidgetsTCL.so.5.0 => /usr/lib/libvtkWidgetsTCL.so.5.0 (0xb7eb7000)
 [...]
.so symlinks are needed to find versioned libraries when linking, they
are not used
at runtime and it would be nice if they were also not needed to run tcl scripts.

Denis