Dear Joachim and Simon, Thank you for your responses. On Wednesday 04 January 2012 12:31:23 Joachim Breitner wrote:
I guess this means me... Indeed Debian has the policy to avoid modified bundled libraries, if somehow possible. For example, we patch the build system to use the system-provided libffi.
I am curious about the precise definition of "bundled libraries". It can be arranged that the GMP source is modified at GHC build time, so the _source_ package contains the original unmodified tar of GMP (except without documentation). Nevertheless, the _binary_ GHC package will contain integer-gmp library files that contain a binary copy of GMP whose symbols have been renamed. Does this count as a "modified bundled library"? (I am guessing yes.) If such binary bundling is not permissible, would it ok to have a separate Debian package called eg libghcgmp3c2 which is equal to libgmp3c2 except the exported symbols are renamed as expected by a new integer-gmp and the files are suitably renamed to avoid any conflict with libgmp3c2? On Wednesday 04 January 2012 12:21:13 Simon Marlow wrote:
GMP is inherently broken because it has global state, so if you want two use it from two clients in the same program, you need two copies of it.
If this could be fixed that would be fantastic. Nevertheless, I am currently unaware of how hard this might be to persue, technically or politically. (My gut feeling is that it is not straightforward.) Kind regards, Michal On 22/12/2011 22:58, Michal Konečný wrote:
I think the following concrete changes would be required in the GHC distribution:
(a) make a ghc build always use the bundled GMP
(b) apply a renaming script onto the GMP tar before adding it to the GHC source bundle
(c) rename symbols analogously in integer-gmp/cbits/*
An alternative to (b) is to apply the renaming to the GMP sources just before building it.
--
|o| Michal Konecny