> I would like to make it co-installable with OpenSSL, but in general, > this should be a drop-in replacement until APIs really diverge in a > visible way. Yes, it would provide 'openssl', but I intend to place them > into a different directory, so you might have to use LD_PATH to get > them.
That reminds me of what we were trying to do with Xaw in the late 1990s. Short story -- we tried and we failed. I wish you better luck, but I fear that you're setting on a course that will bring you a lot of pain. In the late 1990s, the only widget set that was free, usable and vendor- neutral was Xaw , which was fairly functional but whose appearance was already somewhat dated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Athena_Widgets There were two "drop in" libraries that were meant to provide binary compatibility with Xaw but with a more pleasant appearance, called Xaw3d and (I think) NextAw. Branden Robinson's plan was to allow the user to select the appearance by setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point at one or the other of the Xaw libraries. It worked reasonably well as long as the user was just using the sample applications provided with X. However, real applications would sometimes subclass widgets, which would cause them to crash unpredictably. Whenever we got a crash report against an Xaw application, the first question was "does unsetting LD_LIBRARY_PATH fix it?". After XFree86 changed the Xaw ABI with Xaw6, Branden finally gave up, and agreed to make Xaw3d an independent library that applications could link against rather than a drop-in replacement. Then Xaw got obsoleted by Gtk+, and the point became moot. History does not necessarily repeat itself, of course. Thanks for listening to an old man's story. -- Juliusz -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/87d2d89hmt.wl-...@pps.univ-paris-diderot.fr