I am creating a new package for bigloo, a Scheme compiler, version 2.2b. It depends on a version of libgc, previously (in version 2.0e) this was libgc4. I have recently adopted this package, and in looking over the previous maintainer's work, I noticed that bigloo includes the source code to libgc, and that the previous maintainer forced bigloo to use the libgc from the libgc4 package rather than the libgc that comes with bigloo.
Now, libgc4 has been gone for quite some time now (and there were numerous
bugs submitted on bigloo because of this fact), replaced by libgc5. The new
version of bigloo, 2.2b, also includes a copy of libgc5 albeit an older one
(5.1, where libgc5 package is 5.3). Apparently the libgc 5.1 source code has
been somewhat integrated into the bigloo source tree. The problem arises
when I try to do what the previous maintainer did, namely: copy the libgc 5.3
lib from the libgc5 package and bypass the building of libgc 5.1 in the
source tree. Everything goes fine, until it tries to build the bigloo.heap:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/mrd/debian/bigloo/old/bigloo-2.2b/lib/2.2b:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH;
\
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH; \
/home/mrd/debian/bigloo/old/bigloo-2.2b/bin/bigloo -unsafe -q -mkheap
-mklib -s Llib/make-lib.scm -heap bigloo.heap
*** ERROR:bigloo:internal error:
aborting -- #f
/home/mrd/debian/bigloo/old/bigloo-2.2b/lib/2.2b contains the libgc 5.3 library.
Now, when I allow bigloo to build its own version of libgc (5.1) and compile,
everything runs smoothly, and I was able to create a debian package with
little trouble. But as the libgc5 package already exists, the bigloo package
would then have to install an older version of the same library. True, it
installs the library into /usr/lib/bigloo/2.2b, which eliminates the name
conflict, rather than /usr/lib, but it would seem more appropriate if it
used the libgc5 (5.3) package's library instead (and perhaps used a symlink
from /usr/lib/bigloo/2.2b/libgc.so to /usr/lib/libgc.so).
From what I can see, I have two options: prepare the package that contains
bigloo's old version of libgc.so, or contact the author and attempt to figure
out why bigloo does not play well with the libgc5 package's libgc.so.
Any input on this matter would be of great help to me, thanks.
Matthew Danish
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