RFC: Alternative to PRIVATELIB

[Baptiste Daroussin]

On Sat, Apr 11, 2015 at 04:28:35PM +0200, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I would like to propose to replace PRIVATELIB with something more convenient.
> 
> First what is PRIVATELIB is trying to solve:
> We are maintaining stable ABI over branches but some third parties sources
> are not really good at maintaining stable ABI, so we do hide them into private
> where nothing can use it. We do not provide headers for that and we add rpath to
> every binaries that needs to link to those.
> 
> What is the issues of PRIVATELIB:
> any application linking to a library from base (a regular one) that does itself
> links to a PRIVATELIB cannot anymore statically link to the said application.
> 
> The is no mechanism to handle PRIVATELIBS in compat*x ports which can be a
> problem if one of our regular lib is linked to a privatelib and ends up into
> compat one day.
> 
> It prevents easy linking for 3rd party application using those privatelibs on
> purpose (aka with the knowledge abi can break) like libbsdstat.
> 
> What I would like to propose is the following:
> 
> Create in bsd.lib.mk support for PRIVATE knobs (what ever name you do prefer)
> 
> It will just prefix the name of the library with "private" but install it in the
> regular place
> 
> It will automatically decide to install the headers into /usr/include/private/${LIB}/
> Each private library headers in a custom place to avoid an application that
> deliberatly use a given privatelib to find another one
> 
> Prefix all manpage with private_ so that we can provide the documentation for
> the said libs for the version we ship but if another version is shipped by ports
> then we can easily access both documentation.
> 
> As a result bsd.lib.mk will be simpler, we could again static link against
> everything we ship in base, we can provide documentation for those libs and we
> can easily isolate them anyway from the ports.
> 
> I plan to start working on this in a week.
> 
> Best regards,
> Bapt

This patch shows an example with libucl:
https://people.freebsd.org/~bapt/private.diff

Best regards,
Bapt
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