[Pkg-vala-maintainers] Which vala version is the default? -- or, how are/will they be handled?

[David Paleino]

Hello people,
please CC me on replies, as I'm not subscribed.

I'm maintaining a couple of Vala-related packages:

 * gedit-valencia-plugin
 * valatoys
 * valide (ITP'ed, package quite ready)

Now, I'm writing to you because I'm seeing many many MANY (IMVHO) versions of
vala in the archive. I fear this will cause some headaches to people maintaining
vala-related packages.
An example follows.

I compiled valatoys and gedit-valencia-plugin against vala-0.10.
When working on valide, it was an old version depending on vala-1.0. Failing to
properly patch it to work with vala-0.10, I grabbed an SVN revision, which
supports vala-0.12 (which is in experimental). So I added the proper
Build-Depends, and targetted the package at experimental.
However, its buildsystem just uses "valac", so I had to add a Build-Conflicts
on valac-0.10 (since it happened to be installed on my system). Also the
program itself uses "valac" to compile source files (it's an IDE, so...). So a
Conflict was ensured as well.

So I thought: what will happen when vala-0.12 will hit unstable? Which one will
be the default? What should programs depending on vala be compiled against?

If I just keep valatoys and valencia compiled against 0.10, and valide with
0.12, I'd just end up with those being not installable at the same time (due
to the binary Conflicts). And I wouldn't really want this. Generally, it's a
bad idea that a set of "frontends" decides which "backends" (i.e. the
compilers/libraries) will be installed/removed.

So here's my question: is all this transitory, and you will maintain just one
version of Vala?
Or should we (as maintainers) patch the software not to use the aspecific
"valac", but a versioned one? (so there would be no need to add a Conflict)

I guess the latter makes more sense, but any comment shedding some light on the
matter would be *VERY* welcome :)

Thank you,
David

-- 
 . ''`.   Debian developer | http://wiki.debian.org/DavidPaleino
 : :'  : Linuxer #334216 --|-- http://www.hanskalabs.net/
 `. `'`  GPG: 1392B174 ----|---- http://deb.li/dapal
   `-   2BAB C625 4E66 E7B8 450A C3E1 E6AA 9017 1392 B174
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-vala-maintainers/attachments/20110226/65499479/attachment.pgp>