Hello, Many Linux distributions (e.g. Alpine Linux and Debian) split packages into multiple subpackages. For instance, library development headers are usually separated from .so files since the former are commonly not needed as a run-time dependency. As part of this split, only versioned sonames are commonly provided by library packages (e.g. libexample.so.4.2.0), the symbolic link to the current .so (e.g. libexample.so -> libexample.so.4.2.0) is provided in a separate development subpackage for every library. This is done to ensure that the unversioned .so symbolic link is only used during compilation, for loading purposes a versioned .so name should always be used. This eases rebuilding packages on ABI changes (i.e. soname version bumps).
Many scripting languages, e.g. python, implement a fuzzy search in their FFI library to also match .so files with version numbers [1]. Unfortunately, guile's load-foreign-library does not do so. That is, (load-foreign-library "libexample") will only match libexample.so but not libexample.so.4.2.0. As a consequence, guile packages using FFI will always require a run-time dependency on development subpackages (including headers), only for the .so symbolic link, which is very inconvenient for us at Alpine [2]. Would it be possible to modify load-foreign-library to also match .so file names with a version postfix (like python does for instance)? Please CC me, I am not subscribed to the list. Greetings, Sören [1]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/ctypes.html?highlight=find_library#ctypes.util.find_library [2]: https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/issues/12783
