Bug#701702: lintian: warn if debian/shlibs.local references foreign packages
Control: tags -1 moreinfo
On 2013-02-26 13:46, Sven Joachim wrote:
> Package: lintian
> Version: 2.5.10.4
> Severity: wishlist
>
> There are ~70 source packages in unstable/main which contain
> debian/shlibs.local. It seems that most of them are library packages
> where this file contains information about packages actually shipped
> from the same source, and AFAIK there is nothing really wrong with that,
> although it could be considered bad style.
>
> However, there are also cases where shlibs.local is used to override
> information provided by _other_ packages, and this practice should be
> strongly discouraged since it can lead to wrong dependencies; see
> #583551 for an example, or #701627 for a problem I found myself. In
> other cases, shlibs.local is just cruft, referencing packages which no
> longer exist (see #701696, for instance).
>
> It would be great if lintian could detect when debian/shlibs.local
> references packages not built from the same source and issue a warning
> for that.
>
> See also the thread starting at
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa/2008/12/threads.html#00063.
>
>
> [...]
>
>
I brought this up on #debian-devel and it seems a bit controversial.
Apparently there are valid use cases for debian/shlibs.local in cases like:
* Library version 1.1 has no new symbols, so its shlibs file stay
with 1.0.
* Reverse dependency needs version 1.1 due to a bug in the library.
It is not clear to me whether the library ought to have bumped its
shlibs file in this case, but people seemed to expect this wasn't
required from the library (from their insistence of using d/shlibs.local).
Another reason for using debian/shlibs.local (for internal packages
only) is that if you have enough binary packages, it reduces the
maintaince burden. You just have to update your d/shlibs.local and
dpkg-shlibdeps fixes the rest via ${shlib:Depends}. So I am not sure we
are ready to consider d/shlibs.local "bad style" either
Personally, I would like to see this debated on debian-devel@l.d.o
before we continue with writing a check for it.
~Niels
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