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

[Ian Campbell]

On Sun, 2011-10-23 at 23:13 +0100, Jonathan Ludlam wrote:

> >> - 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.
> > 
> 
> True, but from the perspective of anyone using the ocaml libs in
> vanilla xen 4.1.2, having them renamed underneath you in a bugfix
> release is a bit rude. This is all hypothetical of course, since we
> don't know of any users of the ocaml :-)

I think this is something which would prevent us (as in upstream
Xen.org) from taking this into a stable branch, so it'd be a packaging
only patch for now. 4.2 will be out before Wheezy though so it would go
away again quite quickly.

> Anyway, the problem isn't insurmountable, and as I said, if we could
> only get the native libraries to work properly then that's no big
> deal. Xapi uses native compilation exclusively, so it won't hurt us. 

I wonder...

The stuff under /usr/lib/xen-X.Y is registered with the Debian
alternatives infrastructure as /usr/lib/xen-default which is supposed to
pickup the correct version for what you are actually running. One option
might be to place the real ocaml files in /usr/lib/xen-X.Y but also
install symlinks in /usr/lib/ocaml (or whatever) which point
at /usr/lib/xen-default/lib/ocaml. Hopefully that would allow ocaml
stuff to compile without modification in the common case of wanting to
compile against the current hypervisor and be sufficient for most of
what we need.

Ian.
-- 
Ian Campbell

Whatever it is, I fear Greeks even when they bring gifts.
		-- Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil)