MPFR in MacPorts

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jun 10, 2010, at 09:03, Jack Howarth wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 03:48:19PM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
>> FYI, GNU MPFR 3.0.0 has just been released, but it is normal that
>> I haven't updated the port yet: this new version is *not* binary
>> compitible with the previous ones, and there are some dependencies
>> that must be resolved first. For instance, the current Math::MPFR
>> Perl module is not compatible with MPFR 3; its author will upload
>> a new version to CPAN soon.
>> 
>> All ports that depend on MPFR will need to be rebuilt (otherwise
>> you'll get a failure because libmpfr.1.dylib cannot be found).
> 
> This is one of the major defects in the current MacPorts implementation
> IMHO. There really ought to be a way to have co-existing mpfr-shlibs
> packages for 2.x and 3.x but conflicting mpfr packages for building
> programs against. We have exactly the same issue with molmol in
> MacPorts. It is incompatible with the current openmotif 2.3.x releases and
> needs co-existing openmotif-shlibs packages for 2.2.x and 2.3.x so
> that molmol can be built and run against openmotif 2.2.x.

I guess I don't understand the distinction you're making. What's the problem with the strategy we've followed thus far, which would be for mpfr to be updated to version 3.0.0 and a new port mpfr2 to be created for the last version of mpfr 2.x and to update ports to use mpfr2 if needed? Or alternately for mpfr to stay at version 2 and a new port mpfr3 to be created? These strategies seem to have served us well so far.