Re: possible MBF about Policy 8.2 (Shared library support files)
Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de> writes:
> I mentioned before that there are a lot of packages that violate
> Policy 8.2 Shared library support files:
> | If your package contains files whose names do not change with each
> | change in the library shared object version, you must not put them
> | in the shared library package. Otherwise, several versions of the
> | shared library cannot be installed at the same time without
> | filename clashes, making upgrades and transitions unnecessarily
> | difficult.
> I detected 1063 possible violations with some percentage of false
> positives. Since those are too many to go through by hand I filtered a
> bit for the location of the violating files:
> /etc/ : 137 packages
> /bin/ or /usr/bin : 285 packages
> /sbin/ or /usr/sbin/: 47 packages
> Still too many for one go and a huge overlap between the 3 cases so I
> picked just packages that contained a shared library (as witnessed by
> a shlibs file in the control.tar.gz) and files in /etc/. I considered
> any file in /etc/ that does not contain a version in its path or name
> that would make it distinct from a future SOVERSION in violation of
> 8.2. I (hopefully) removed all false positives (leaving 126 packages).
One of the potentially tricky parts of this, just to warn, is that Policy
says just that the files need to change with each change to the SONAME,
not that this has to be done in any specific way. So while it's a lot
cleaner to separate the package (I think), there are cases where we know,
for some reason, that the upstream is either never going to change SONAME
ever or that the file will be guaranteed to be obsolete and not included
in the next revision.
So there may be some cases here where people will say "this really doesn't
apply to me."
(For example, it probably doesn't really apply to glibc, since the chances
of it changing SONAMEs are pretty low, although I do appreciate the libc
maintainers breaking it apart anyway.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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