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

[Denis Barbier]

On 2008/10/22 Sebastien BARRE wrote:
> At 10/22/2008 02:23 AM, Denis Barbier wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> Out of curiosity, how can this change break backward compatibility?
>
> If doing a "package require vtk" is looking at the unversioned ones, and you
> make it look at the versioned ones directly, then you just broke backward
> compatibility for people who rely on that behavior.

Adam's patch is:
-      set libFile [file join $libPath "$libPrefix$libName$libExt"]
+      set libFile [file join $libPath "$libPrefix$libName$libExt$libVer"]
       if {[catch "cd {$libPath}; load {$libFile}" errorMessage]} {
$libFile is used only to give shared library name.

When libvtkFOO.so is symlinked to libvtkFOO.so.5.2, I can hardly
see how someone can detect this change, except if library name
is different for some arch.  Such a breakage will be caught by
your dashboard, won't it?  So what about making this change
and see if something breaks, does it sound reasonable?

Denis