Re: RFC: Handling of mozilla libraries
On Mon, Mar 17, 2003 at 07:23:11PM +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Instead of randomly breaking things, maybe it is time to rethink how
> mozilla's libraries are handled. As I understand it, moving those
> libraries to /usr/lib/mozilla is dictated by the fact they don't have a
> SONAME (and we require a SONAME for libs in /usr/lib). But then, the
> linker cannot find them anymore as they are not in one of its
> directories.
> There are at least 3 very important issues regarding these libraries :
> 1) libraries without SONAME
> 2) libraries in /usr/lib/mozilla
> 3) no stable ABI and nothing in the packaging to prevent breakage
>
> 1) could be solved by adding a SONAME. This would render us
> binary-incompatible with upstream, but I don't think anyone is using
> binary applications linked against mozilla today.
> This would automatically solve 2), and 3) could be solved with putting
> the libraries in a separate package.
>
> The question is whether we really want to introduce that
> incompatibility. Another possible solution would be to keep those
> libraries without SONAME in /usr/lib like mozilla 1.2 did, but to use
> virtual packages for dependencies, i.e. providing mozilla-1.3, and
> making galeon/whatever depend on mozilla-1.3. This would solve 3) by the
> means of the dependency system.
I was using a virtual package trick like the above for my ocaml
packages, and was told by James Troup that the autobuilders are not
happy if you use such a virtual dependency as build-depends.
As i suppose galeon would build depend on mozilla-1.3, the same problem
would be encountered here, so you should better think of it. That said,
i don't really know what the problem was, my best guess is that the
autobuilders are not able to infer the real package name from the
virtual one or something such, and that manual intervention is needed
for this. If so, maybe it is ok for galeon, since it is only one
package.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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