Tommi Höynälänmaa <tommi.hoynalan...@gmail.com> writes: > Guile (at least the Debian version) is designed so that different > versions (e.g. 2.0 and 2.2) can coexist in the same system. However, > this is not so for packages guile-xxx-dev. Consequently, many software > libraries (such as guile-gnome-platform) have to be compiled for a > single Guile version and they can't be used for several Guile versions > in the same system. > > Could this be changed? For example, we could rename libguile.h to > libguile-<version>.h and do the same for Guile libraries.
I see this as a packaging issue. In pkgsrc, one can install multiple guile versions, each with headers (pkgsrc does not have the notion of -dev for headers; packages just have headers). It does this by using prefixes. For example guile 2.2 is built using the prefix /usr/pkg/guile/2.2 instead of the usual /usr/pkg. I think it's far easier to build different versions in different prefixes, letting depending packages add in that prefix, than to try to rename every file that's installed to have a version in it. The real issue though is that guile seems to not have a stable enough API that there are lots of things out there that have to use old versions. Fixing that would be best :-) but I realize that everything has a good reason and that's easier said than done.
