Bug#249122: libc6: ldconfig: Creates spurious libncurses.so.5 symlink

[Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>]

Package: libc6
Version: 2.3.2.ds1-12
Severity: serious

I'm marking this bug as RC because it leads to packages being built with
missing dependencies on libncurses5.

When ldconfig is run with libncurses5 + libncurses5-dev installed, it
creates a symlink /usr/lib/libncurses.so.5 that points to libtermcap.so.
The latter is a symlink to libncurses.so which is a symlink to
/lib/libncurses.so.5.

This in itself is no great drama.

However, this totally confuses dpkg-shlibdeps as it fails to determine the
correct shlib dependency for libncurses5.  In fact, it will happily build
packages that use libncurses5 with no dependency on it at all:

$ dpkg-shlibdeps.orig debian/tmp/usr/bin/telnet.netkit
dpkg-shlibdeps.orig: warning: could not find any packages for /usr/lib/libncurses.so.5 (libncurses.so.5)
dpkg-shlibdeps.orig: warning: unable to find dependency information for shared library libncurses (soname 5, path /usr/lib/libncurses.so.5, dependency field Depends)
$ echo $?
0
$ cat debian/substvars
shlibs:Depends=libc6 (>= 2.3.2.ds1-4), libgcc1 (>= 1:3.3.3-1), libstdc++5 (>= 1:3.3.3-1)
$

Since ldconfig in woody did not create such a symlink, and AFAIK it would
be trivial to avoid doing so by checking whether the target itself is
a symlink, I think ldconfig should be modified so that this symlink is
not created.

However, even after this is fixed we'll need to regularly monitor packages
that use libncurse5 since the developer's systems may still have broken
libncurses symlinks.

-- System Information
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Kernel Version: Linux gondolin 2.4.25-1-686-smp #1 SMP Tue Feb 24 12:07:16 EST 2004 i686 GNU/Linux

Versions of the packages libc6 depends on:
ii  libdb1-compat  2.1.3-7        The Berkeley database routines [glibc 2.0/2.