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Re: Dependencies on shared libs, take 2



On Mon, 04 Jun 2007, Loïc Minier wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 04, 2007, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> > Library maintainers are supposed to maintain the *.symbols file.  For
> > this, they have to create files "debian/<package>.symbols.<arch>"
> > (dpkg-gensymbols will try too fallback to "debian/symbols.<arch>",
> > "debian/<package>.symbols" and "debian/symbols"). They are
> > required to provide the minimal version (as used in the dependency
> > generated) associated to each symbol.
> 
>  While this seemed sensible on my first read, I think it's a burden to
>  effectively maintain multiple *.symbols.* files for multiple arches or
>  packages (for example flavors of the same library) with only small
>  differences between the lists.
>    I was about to suggest adding a way to share such lists, for example
>  an include mechanism, but all of this seems to be at the wrong level:
>  I think dpkg-* tools should only be concerned about debian/symbols or
>  DEBIAN/symbols, and leave handling of architecture / package specific
>  overrides to higher level stacks such as debhelper.

While I agree on the burden, I don't think it's wise to rely on other
tools to merge multiple informations in a single file which would then be
given to dpkg-gensymbols.

I want to first do archive-wide rebuilds and see how many packages have
differences between arches and what's best to handle them. 

>  Quid of udebs?  Are these affected by the changes?

No (or at least they shouldn't). The problem with udebs is multiple:
1/ they are meant to be small, so we don't want to integrate symbols file
in the .udeb
2/ dpkg-shlibdeps does follow executable -> library -> package ->
/var/lib/dpkg/info/<package>.{shlibs,symbols} to find out the
dependencies. However with udebs the step "library -> package" can't be
done with "dpkg --search" (it's currently done this way by dpkg-shlibdeps).

If those two problems are solved, then it can also be done for udebs of
course.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog

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