More packages supporting V8 JavaScript engine

www-client/chromium, the web browser, is not the only package using V8 JavaScript engine.

net-libs/nodejs is using system-provided V8, and also dev-db/mongodb can use it instead of SpiderMonkey with USE="v8". I am excited to see more packages in Gentoo using this super-fast JavaScript engine, and hopefully there will be more in the future. Also, it should be very easy to develop your own applications using V8 (just run "emerge v8").

By the way, for now every release of V8 is using a different SONAME, because upstream cannot guarantee binary compatibility even across minor releases. Because of this, all applications using V8 have to be recompiled after updating the shared library.

I am looking for a few solutions to this problem. First, I think it is not realistic to make a few releases share the same SONAME without upstream cooperation (for a few reasons read Diego's Your symbol table is not your ABI). However, generally the releases seem to be compatible: http://linuxtesting.org/upstream-tracker/versions/v8.html. Also, because V8 is now independent from the applications (i.e. not bundled with them), you should not need to update it unless necessary.

It is not obvious how well this is going to work, so any feedback is welcome, especially if you hit bugs.

Watch out for issues with prelink and sys-libs/glibc-2.13

I am usually only running stable Gentoo systems, so I have not seen the problem myself. However, unstable (~arch) users may be affected and it seems really serious. If you are using prelink and ~arch Gentoo, please read the following before updating and consider undoing the prelinking and removing prelink:

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=353814
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-863297-start-0-postdays-0-postorder-asc-highlight-.html