Re: github pull requests for libffi

[Samuli Suominen <ssuominen at gentoo dot org>]

On 07/01/13 12:59, Anthony Green wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 10:45 AM, Matthias Klose <doko@ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > thanks for the merge!  I noticed two minor issues:
> >
> >   - the soversion in the GCC repository is still at 4, compared to
> >     6 in 3.0.11. Is this intended? libjava isn't linked with the shared
> >     libffi, but a make install installs the shared library.
>
> I've always been of the opinion that GCC shouldn't install libffi.
> There have been some objections in the past.  Maybe I'll try again.

+1

We are packaging libffi from the separate package instead of gcc in 
Gentoo Linux, and it works very well for Python, Haskell, Java, and so 
forth. Every problem I've seen with it has been pretty much caused by 
unadequate (poor) packaging or missing upstream patches where things 
have already been fixed for the .so.6

So we actually sed the gcc's build system to avoid it:

sed -i -e 's/\(install.*:\) install-.*recursive/\1/' libffi/Makefile.in
sed -i -e 's/\(install-data-am:\).*/\1/' "libffi/include/Makefile.in

- Samuli