Re: shlibs and lintian

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Zvi Dubitzky <DUBI@il.ibm.com> writes:

> Hi
> What do you mean the libraries are broken ?

It might be helpful to read Policy chapter 8:

    http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-sharedlibs.html

which explains the purpose of the library SONAME.  The problem here
appears to be that you have libraries without any version number in the
SONAME.  This both violates Policy 8.1 because there's no versioning in
the SONAME:

    Every time the shared library ABI changes in a way that may break
    binaries linked against older versions of the shared library, the
    SONAME of the library and the corresponding name for the binary
    package containing the runtime shared library should change. Normally,
    this means the SONAME should change any time an interface is removed
    from the shared library or the signature of an interface (the number
    of parameters or the types of parameters that it takes, for example)
    is changed. This practice is vital to allowing clean upgrades from
    older versions of the package and clean transitions between the old
    ABI and new ABI without having to upgrade every affected package
    simultaneously.

and it makes it impossible to use the shlibs section because the shlibs
file syntax requires a version number in the SONAME (see Policy 8.6.3).

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>