[Pkg-xen-devel] [patch] Packages ocaml libraries

[Thomas Goirand]

On 10/23/2011 05:27 PM, Jon Ludlam wrote:
> Hi Thomas,
> 
> I don't see why the patches shouldn't be back ported - I believe we're
> the only user of the ocaml bindings, so nobody else should be affected

What do you mean "backported"? Do you mean take your code change in the
ocaml, and backport it to current Xen 4.1.1 in SID? I don't see why not,
but in this case, I think you'd be the best person to take care of that.
Would a simple copy of the ocaml folder be enough?

> - certainly nobody on the list commented to that effect when I
> submitted the patches. However, it *is* a breaking change, so there may
> be some principles that back porting would violate; we'd have to
> confirm it with the xen maintainers.

Well, since the ocaml libraries have never been shipped by the binary
packages of Xen in Debian, we aren't breaking anything form the Debian
perspective.

> However, having thought about the layout of the existing debian xen
> packages, I think that there will be a requirement that the ocaml
> libraries live under /usr/lib/xen-4.1/lib/ocaml (I think Bastian hinted
> at this back in July but I didn't spot the implication).

This whole /usr/lib/xen-<version> thing is only there because Bastian
wants to maintain it, probably because he wants to be able to install
more than one Xen hypervisor at the same time (right?). Bastian wants to
invest time in this, I don't think it is *required* that we do.

It's a pain to maintain, adds Debian specific patches, put things in
non-standard directories (with implications for the other packages). And
one has yet to convince me in what situation it is needed to have more
than one Xen hypervisor version installed at the same time. I really
would love to see this "feature" reverted in Debian, unless upstream Xen
itself starts supporting it...

> In a worse-case scenario, we could package up the
> native libraries only.

What do you call the "native libraries"?

Thomas