Re: Transition: krb5 to drop Kerberos IV (libkrb53 restructuring)

[Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org>]

On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 03:12:09PM +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> On Sat, 28 Feb 2009, Julien BLACHE wrote:
> > Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> wrote:

> > >> debian/shlibs.local should help for that.

> > > Except symbols files have priority over shlibs and there's no
> > > symbols.local.

> > I sense a lack of flexibility in this symbols file feature, hmm.

> shlibs.local was initially a poor solution for a less than ideal
> dpkg-shlibdeps that couldn't cope with shlibs just produced by the
> packages being built.

Are you sure this was the reason?  shlibs.local support was added to
dpkg-shlibdeps in 1996, which I think was before either you or I were
involved in Debian...

> You can certainly obtain a similar result nowadays by putting the
> dependency that you want in debian/control directly and by using
> the -x option of dpkg-shlibdeps to strip the dependency that you did not
> want.

Except you could *always* do this, and maintainers preferred to be able to
use shlibs.local instead.  There's a difference between hard-coding the
library as a dependency for your package, and saying "for any binaries that
need lib foo, use lib bar as the dependency".

It sounds like you're unilaterally deprecating the shlibs.local feature, in
a way that is likely to cause silent breakage for packages currently using
it.

$ find /srv/lintian.debian.org/laboratory/source -name shlibs.local | wc -l
100
$

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com                                     vorlon@debian.org