Re: Bug#13994: xlib6: Should provide elf-x11r6lib
Richard Braakman wrote:
>
> Hm...
> The reason to remove "Provides: elf-x11r6lib" from xlib6 was that
> that virtual package was obsolete and it was time to get rid of
> the dependencies on it.
>
> But those dependencies are going to go away anyway, when all the
> package are recompiled for xlib6g.
>
> Therefore, why break things in the interim?
Actually, the cause of this bug has not been fixed! And it's going to
give us more headache in the future. The (or the one that I've found)
reason that there are packages that depend on elf-x11r6lib long after
the correct dependencies have been placed into the shlibs file is that
this was what was in /etc/dpkg/shlibs.default for a long time (it has
been changed recently but it is still NOT good enough). This does not
usually cause any problems except when a particular library does not
have a shlib file. Now the X libraries do have shlib files so why does
/etc/dpkg/shlibs.default get used? It's because many developpers use
Xaw3d or other xaw replacements which do NOT provide shlib files. So on
these systems /etc/dpkg/shlibs.default will be used instead of the
correct shlib file.
The reason why this is still relevant today is that
/etc/dpkg/shlibs.default now contains an entry for libXaw that uses the
xliby (libc5) library. So whenever someone compiles a libc6 program
that uses libXaw on a machine that uses an xaw replacement, the libc5
dependency maybe included wrongly. The solution seems to be to put the
xlib6g entries into /etc/dpkg/shlibs.default. But what is there to stop
a new batch of X libraries from being released? I think the ultimate
solution is to include shlib files in xaw replacements. There should be
no difficulties in doing so since the xaw replacements should correspond
to the xlib6 libraries exactly. For example, there should be two
versions of xaw3d, one for libc5 and one for libc6 containing
appropriate shlib files. And the X maintainer should use conflict
clauses against old xaw libraries just as if there were old xlib6
libraries.
PS The fact that the entries in /etc/dpkg/shlibs.default are for libc5
has already been reported in #13140.
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