[Scons-users] InstallVersionedLibrary sometimes fails when symlinking

[Managan, Rob]

I have reproduced this on Ubuntu 12.04. I will check on OSX tomorrow.

It appears to be some subtlety about needing to delete a link before recreating it. I don't understand why the error message refers to the file you are linking to but that is OK.

I have a fix that works on Ubuntu that I hope to test on OSX and then submit a patch.

Rob Managan
________________________________
From: scons-users-bounces at scons.org [scons-users-bounces at scons.org] on behalf of Andrew C. Morrow [andrew.c.morrow at gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, May 27, 2013 10:04 PM
To: SCons users mailing list
Subject: Re: [Scons-users] InstallVersionedLibrary sometimes fails when symlinking


On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 11:03 PM, William Deegan <bill at baddogconsulting.com<mailto:bill at baddogconsulting.com>> wrote:
Andrew,

Were you able to repro this? If so, should I file a ticket?

Unfortunately, very busy IRL at the moment so haven't had a chance to try it out.
Lots of work leading up to a conference, once that's over (6/6) I'll have some time to take a look at this.

Sounds good. I just wanted to make sure it didn't get missed. Built in support for versioned shared libraries is a really useful feature and I'd very much like to use it. I'm sure I'm not the only one.



Also, is there some documentation on the SCons bugfix and release cycle? I've noticed that there are only infrequently 'z +1' releases of SCons x.y.z. If the problem with InstallVersionedLibrary is legitimate, should I expect to see a fix in a to-be-released-somewhat-soonish SCons 2.3.1 bugfix release, or longer term in some future SCons 2.4 release?


SCons is a volunteer run open source project.
If you want to ensure that a fix is made, you'll either have to submit a fix, hope that someone in the community picks up the issue and fixes it, or finance a consultant to resolve the issue for you.

I'm aware of the nature of the project. Still, this is a feature documented in the SCons manual pages. Someone loved this feature enough to shepherd it through development, code review, testing, documentation, and release.


In general we will release a new version either when something notable has been fixed or if there's been a sufficient number of small fixes.
If a fix is submitted for your issue (assuming it's not user error (which from a cursory glance it doesn't look like it is)), then it would be in the next release.

Right, but "next release" at which revision level, and on (roughly) what time scale? Without some insight into the release process, intended schedule, defect triage process, backport policy, etc., it is difficult to reason about whether I should abandon my attempts to use this new feature or not. Even if I were to debug this particular issue and submit a patch as you have suggested, the adoption of that fix into a published release may not mesh with my own release schedule. I'm not complaining - I merely want to better understand: If I or someone else submitted a patch tonight, would it likely land in a 2.3.1 release in one month, or in a 2.4.0 in 6 months, or something else entirely?


Also keep in mind all the work is done in a public mercurial repo hosted on bitbucket, so as soon as anyone published a fix you can try it against your build, and use that code if it resolves your issue.

That works well for projects that I plan to build for myself. However, for open source projects which use SCons as the publicly facing build system it is not a realistic solution to require downstream consumers to use the SCons mainline or manually patch their SCons installs. Such projects are constrained to use the demonstrably working subset of the official SCons releases that make their way into distribution and language package repositories. Potentially, a project could drag in the entire slug of fixed code and redefine the InstallVersionedLibrary, but this has different problems.

Thanks,
Andrew

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