Putting my packages up for adoption

[Charles Wilson]

Warren Young wrote:
> Brian Dessent wrote:
>> Otherwise, you potentially violate the GPL licensing requirement to
>> provide the source as it would disappear from the mirrors entirely as
>> new 'foo' versions pushed the old one off.
> 
> So what I need to do, then, is rebuild the 1.95.8 package so it _only_ 
> builds the DLL package? 

You can if you want to, but I never do.  I just do this:

cp foo-1.2.3-1-src.tar.bz2 libfooN-1.2.3-1-src.tar.bz2
and edit libfooN's setup.hint to remove the external-source specifier.

> I can see also building the devel package, 

This is harder than you think, unless the upstream folks have already 
done the heavy lifting. In most cases, however, the unaltered upstream 
source for version N+1 installs its headers into the same place, with 
the same names, as the upstream headers for version N.

Ditto the import libs (one exception is libpng, where you /can/ say 
-lpng10 or -lpng12 because the implibs (and static libs) have different 
names between the two versions.  But /usually/ that is not the case, and 
you have libfoo.a (and libfoo.dll.a) for both version N+1's and version 
N.  Since they both install into ${prefix}/lib, ...

> but 
> only if there's a lot of unwillingness to port to expat 2, and to know 
> whether that's going to happen, we have to release without and see what 
> happens, right?

It's up to you, really. And sometimes, it's just not easy to do, because 
of the above. Other developers who don't want to upgrade can keep their 
existing setup, and use it -- or compile their own version locally into 
a different prefix.

--
Chuck