lintian and binary plugins

[David Benson <daveb@idealab.com>]

Hello,

I am one of the authors of GDAM, a LGPL'd sound processing program,
and I am trying to make lintian happy with my package.

I am running into a number of problems pertaining to
shared-library plugins.  These are elf-shared-libraries
that gdam can dynamically load as needed.

The policy appears to not treat plugins specially;
I think they fall under "shared libraries" but they
are really a rather special type of library;  in my case:

	- the ld.so-required names plugin_name.so.%d.%d.%d,
	  plugin_name.so.%d are not needed or used.
	- the base name plugin_name.so [acc to the policy
	  this file mostly belongs in -dev packages.

Lintian gives warnings:

W: gdam: non-dev-pkg-with-shlib-symlink usr/lib/gdam/plugins/model/gdamgong.so.0
.0.0 usr/lib/gdam/plugins/model/gdamgong.so

And errors:

E: gdam: ldconfig-symlink-before-shlib-in-deb usr/lib/gdam/plugins/server/gdasph
aser.so.0

What should I do?

	- ignore the warnings?
	- move the .so files [or rename them] so
	  that lintian doesn't see them?

I was hoping the gimp would be a good example,
but its plugins are really executables.

Does anyone know of a good package that
uses plugins I can inspect?

- Dave Benson
  daveb@ffem.org

ps. you can get the last release package, which exhibits these
    problems from:

    	http://www.ffem.org/gdam/download/gdam_0.929-2_i386.deb