Gentoo users probably know better than other distribution users the pain that is with foreign language bindings (C++, Python, Ruby, …) for various libraries. But these pains often are caused by what I think is a mistake in packages design: letting the foreign language bindings to “live with their parents”, that is with the original library that the bindings are bound to.
The first issue here is now we implement these cases in Gentoo: this is usually done through USE flags with the name of the language, like ruby, python, cxx, which enable building and installing the bindings; this also means that if a software is written using those bindings it has to use EAPI 2 USE dependencies or built_with_use checks. This is certainly not optimal, but I cannot blame upstream to the way we have to handle it, can I?
What I think the problem is, is that by having bindings and original library in the same packaging you’re forcing the same release cycle on two products that have lives that should be mostly independent. If you have to fix a nasty security bug in the underlying library, you don’t really need to release or rebuild the actual bindings. If you need to release new bindings to go with a new language version for things like Python and Ruby, you most likely not have to release a new version of the underlying library.
In general, you can expect that as long as the interface of the underlying library is stable, the bindings can remain the same even after ten bugfix releases of the libraries; or if the library is stable by itself, and the bindings aren’t, they can be released ten times for a single library release. This goes well in the name of reducing the amount of code that a single release affects.
The reason why reducing the amount of code a single release affect is not just that source-based distribution like Gentoo want to reduce the build time for their users, but it also goes to make it much easier for the various distribution to test the code, and ensures that unrelated changes get merged in with important fixes. This is especially useful for distributions with stable branches like Debian and Gentoo.
So please, when you write a library and want to add further bindings, create further packages, pretty please!
You are awesome. I wish you were a Debian developer as well as a Gentoo one.
Michal Čihař has merged the Debian packages for Gammu and its Python bindings. He argues [1]:”[…] The fact that several past releases have to happen together for both python-gammu and Gammu is not the only reason for merge. The other two major reasons are cross-compilation and testing. Besides this, with merged source, it will be easier for some distributions to deploy newer Gammu to released products. […]”[1] http://blog.cihar.com/archi…