[geos-devel] RFC6 - Discourage use of C++ API by requiring a configure switch to install the c++ headers and SDK

[Robert Coup]

Hi Bas,

On 5 October 2017 at 11:01, Bas Couwenberg <sebastic at xs4all.nl> wrote:

> Yes, Debian distributions will only ever have a single gdal package,
> Ubuntu by extension will too (because they just copy the packages from
> Debian) although newer versions are available in the UbuntuGIS PPA (which
> is a separate repository from the Ubunu ones). The same goes for other
> packages like geos, spatialite, rasterlite, spatialindex, postgis, etc,
> only one version will be included in the distribution that all reverse
> dependencies will use.
>
> Multiple versions make security updates more complex because more than one
> package needs to be patched, and also makes integration of reverse
> dependencies more complex because they'll need to be adapted for one of the
> versions.
>

Ok, so the restriction is policy-based, not technical. Debian/Ubuntu
releases won't provide multiple versions of GEOS, but if someone
builds/runs their own repo then the system will support multiple versions
(eg. continuing my example, a backport of the libgdal20 package will
install alongside libgdal1h).

Seems fair enough :)

Followup question (and vaguely asking you to generalise on behalf of all
distro maintainers) – do you think in the general case distros would take
the upstream project advice and *not* set `--enable-the-cpp-sdk` in builds,
and also therefore *not* accept uploads of new packages using the C++ API?
Debian tends to have a build-with-the-kitchen-sink approach in my
experience, but there has to be a limit somewhere.

Cheers

Rob :)
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