Re: Dependencies of -dev packages
Gabor Gombas <gombasg@sztaki.hu> writes:
> libkrb5-dev Conflicts: heimdal-dev
> ==================================
> The problem here is that this "Conflicts:" assumes that the system has
> just one user, which is simply not true.
Speaking as a co-maintainer of libkrb5-dev, no, this Conflicts assumes
that the two packages, er, conflict. Namely, they provide
identically-named include files which define different ways of
implementing roughly the same API. I'd love to have heimdal-dev and
libkrb5-dev peacefully coexist since I personally use both, but since they
both implement the same API, this is rather difficult to do.
Please note that using pbuilder works around this issue fairly well for
building Debian packages, although I realize that this is far from solving
every application.
> pkg-config comes handy again. If every package provides a .pc file, then
> conflicting libraries and headers can simply be moved to separate
> directories (/usr/lib/heimdal, /usr/lib/mit-krb5, /usr/include/heimdal,
> /usr/include/mit-krb5) and can peacefully coexist.
I don't consider this to be a good solution. #include <krb5.h> is part of
the API, and forcing all packages that want to build with Kerberos to use
special compiler flags to find include files in non-standard locations
seems to me to defeat the entire point of the FHS. (I didn't think
separating the libraries was necessary; don't they use non-conflicting
names already?)
The only solution that seems feasible to me would be using alternatives
for all of the conflicting header files, and that solution doesn't exactly
fill me with glee. I would also question whether running
update-alternatives is really that much easier than simply installing the
other -dev package and letting aptitude do its thing.
(Note that there are other conflicts between MIT Kerberos and Heimdal that
aren't really necessary, though, and I *would* find it reasonable to use
alternatives for the command-line utilities like kinit. This is something
that's on my long-term to-do list, and if one of the Heimdal maintainers
wanted to work with me on that, we could probably make many of those
conflicts go away.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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