Re: RFS: gwyddion - Scanning Probe Microscopy analysis software

[Justin Pryzby <jpryzby+d@quoininc.com>]

On Fri, Sep 07, 2007 at 11:54:18AM +0200, Jan Beyer wrote:
> Dear mentors,
> 
> I am looking for a sponsor for my package "gwyddion".
> 
> * Package name    : gwyddion
>   Version         : 2.8-1
>   Upstream Author : David Nečas (Yeti) <yeti@gwyddion.net>, Petr Klapetek
> <klapetek@gwyddion.net>
> * URL             : http://gwyddion.net/
> * License         : GPL-v2+, and parts PD
>   Section         : science
> 
> It builds these binary packages:
>  gwyddion        - Scanning Probe Microscopy (SPM) analysis software
Neat :)

> (Long) Annotations (=Request for Help/Comment/Explanation):

> Furthermore there are lintian warnings, which I did not quieten. They are
> about the libgwyddion2 package which contains several libraries and thus
> doesn't match the SONAMES of them. What is current practice? Allow the
> warning? Override it? Split the package (This seems useless to me)?

Policy has this to say:
|    If you have several shared libraries built from the same source tree
|    you may lump them all together into a single shared library package,
|    provided that you change all of their sonames at once (so that you
|    don't get filename clashes if you try to install different versions of
|    the combined shared libraries package).

The goal is that debs compiled/depending against any libgwyddion*
libraries are always installable (well, the other goal is that there
are only 2 versions of a library in the active archive at once).  So
you have to avoid the situation where libgwyddion2 includes:
libxyza.so.1 and libxyzb.so.1, and the as-of-yet hypothetical
libgwyddion3 includes libxyza.so.1 and libxyzb.so.2 (thus the new
package name).  In this case lib3 is required to Conflict on lib2 (or
the other way around) since they're not actually co-installable.  But
then every package compiled against lib2 will end up effectively
conflicting with every package compiled against lib3 since it's
impossible to satisfy the packages of any 2 such packages.

So I think the libraries should only be in the same package if they
have the same soname.  (Or, you can put them into a subdirectory of
/usr/lib/ if they're not linked against directly and it's no problem).

> And finally there is a duplicate depends of gwyddion on libgwyddion2, one
> added by the debhelper scripts and one by me - should I override this, or
> take away my hand-written dependency?
I think you should drop the manually-added one since the automatic one
will always be working with ELF dependency output.

Justin