Re: Early adopters of symbol based dependencies needed
On Tue, Nov 20, 2007 at 04:22:56PM +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> Hello,
>
> since the upload of dpkg 1.14.8 to unstable, it's now possible for
> library packages to generate "symbols" control files that will be used by
> other packages to get more accurate (and less strict) dependencies.
>
> As this is a far reaching change, I'd like some skilled maintainers to try
> it out "for real" and help me flesh out some generic guidelines so that when
> we start using it on more packages, we do it right from the first time.
>
> The wiki page http://wiki.debian.org/UsingSymbolsFiles will be used to
> collect various remarks and prepare some useful documentation that will
> be later spread to maintainers through d-d-a (and maybe merged back in
> some dpkg manual page).
FWIW, I'm testing this on libxml2. I'd have some remarks:
- The .symbols file in /var/lib/dpkg/info is bigger than all the other
maintainer files there for libxml2. If a significant amount of packages
implement this, it can start to make a difference. It might be nice to
support a gzipped format.
- Python modules have the same problem as perl modules: the interpreter
doesn't link against the library, so they can't either. That makes a
whole bunch of warnings for each symbol not found... I'm not sure what
should be done for that.
Mike
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