On Sun, Sep 30, 2007 at 11:08:22PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > Nikolaus Schulz <microschulz@web.de> writes: > > > I am packaging printer drivers from Canon, see [1] for the ITP and some > > notes about that very peculiar, awkward beast. These drivers are only > > partly free software, they come with non-free, binary-only libraries. > > While this is bad enough, unfortunately the libraries have unversioned > > sonames, and I see zero chance to have upstream (Canon) fix this. > > > So, one cannot produce valid shlibs files for these libraries. But > > these are required by policy. That is, as Steve Langasek has pointed > > out in [2], the policy de-facto requires libraries to have versioned > > sonames. > > Policy doesn't require valid SONAMEs for private shared libraries specific > to a particular application. The SONAME requirement is to allow > reasonable handling of library changes and upgrades of packages that built > against the libraries, which only applies if the libraries are in a > separate package from the programs that use them. If you have a program > that contains some binaries linked with private libraries, Policy doesn't > really care what those libraries are like provided that they're > self-contained within that package and are installed in a subdirectory of > /usr/lib. [snipped policy section] > It sounds like you should try to treat these upstream shared libraries > under this exception as private libraries for the binaries built by this > package rather than trying to use them as first-class shared libraries. Upstream has provided about half a dozen, separate utility packages, and at least two link against the said libraries. One could argue if these packages *should* be separate, but they are. So I guess the libraries aren't private package-wise, and this isn't possible, right? Also, it would be nice to package the libraries separately, since this allows to have as much of the GPL licenced code[1] go into contrib, and only the libs themselves go into non-free. But this runs into the shlibs problem... I suspect there is no clean solution here; but I wonder what's best. What do you think? Nikolaus [1] There is no legal conflict here, since the licence includes an exception allowing to link against the binary libraries.
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