[Bug 524148] Re: onboard has overactive dependencies

[Emmet Hikory]

I'm not entirely sure.  Both represent different classes of maintenance
issues.  I chose to patch the source on build because from the
documentation I found I had the impression that CDLL matched a specific
API, rather than a specific ABI, and doing it this way allows the ABI to
change without API changes, and track it better.  What I didn't do, but
would be a good extension, is to write a python test-case that exercises
the CDLL calls in X11.py and run that test suite during build, so that
the package fails to build if the calls cannot be satisfied: this, in
combination with the dynamic patching, should cause a behaviour similar
to that found with native C clients of the libraries.

Another reason to choose to patch the source at runtime was to follow
the upstream model: as the source does not specify any specific library
version, it is presumed that it is known to work with a number of
versions (this is certainly the case for a lot of C clients, so I don't
know why it would be diffferent for python CDLL): using the dynamic
patch stays closer to the intent of the upstream code whilst working
around some of the inconveniences that this caused in the way Ubuntu
packages are organised.

-- 
onboard has overactive dependencies
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/524148
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