RE: [ANNOUNCE] libgpiod v1.6 released

[SZ Lin (林上智) <SZ.Lin@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

<snip>

> I personally don't care much about how desktop distros handle this - I'm mostly
> interested in bespoke embedded distros built with yocto or buildroot. I'm Cc'ing
> SZ Lin who maintains the libgpiod debian package.

Nowadays, many embedded distros are derived from Debian, such as Raspberry Pi OS
(previously called Raspbian). Moreover, the meta-debian [1] provides the recipes for the
Poky build system to build images using Debian source packages within the Yocto project [2].

[1] https://github.com/meta-debian/meta-debian
[2] https://www.yoctoproject.org/learn-items/deby-reproducible-and-maintainable-embedded-linux-environment-with-poky/

> 
> SZ Lin: libgpiod will get a new major release in the following months
> - the API will become v2.x and ABI v3.x - do you think it's important to make it
> possible for two major versions of libgpiod to live together in a single system? I

It's possible, but I think it's *no strongly needed* and there are no other Debian 
packages depend on libgpiod, as shown below.

===
apt rdepends libgpiod2
libgpiod2
Reverse Depends:
  Depends: libgpiod-dev (= 1.5.2-1)
  Depends: python3-libgpiod (= 1.5.2-1)
  Depends: gpiod (>= 1.5.1)
===

All of the above binary packages are built from the same (libgpiod) source package.

> would like to avoid having to rename everything and use libgpiod2.0
> everywhere - this information is already stored in the API version. Does debian
> support something like yocto's virtual providers maybe? How do you see this for
> a desktop distro.

I'm not familiar with Yocto's mechanism, but in this case, the ABI changes seem that
are not backward-compatible; we normally require changing the SONAME of the library
and the shared library package name.

SZ

> 
> Best regards,
> Bartosz Golaszewski