Re: Depends/Recommends from libraries
On Thu, 09 Mar 2017 at 17:52:05 -0500, Marvin Renich wrote:
> If more upstreams were careful to use dynamic loading in these
> situations, it would be less of a problem. In a perfect world, the
> solution would be for foo's maintainer to convince upstream to switch to
> dynamic loading.
(For context, I maintain several game engines that default to dlopen()ing
their dependencies, some of which I have patched to stop doing that.)
I do not agree that dlopen()ing dependencies (what you have called "dynamic
loading") is something we should encourage over normal linking with -lfoo
(resulting in a DT_NEEDED entry, what you have called "static loading").
dlopen()ing dependencies in the way that is most commonly implemented,
with dlopen("libimobiledevice.so.6") and dlsym(handle, "idevice_new")
or similar, has some practical problems for Debian:
* The libraries used aren't visible to dpkg-shlibdeps. The maintainer has
to know what dlopen() calls the code will make, and either hard-code an
appropriate Depends (or in this case Recommends), or link a dummy
executable against the same things that are dlopen()ed (as is done
in packages like wine and openal-soft) and use that for dpkg-shlibdeps.
Either way, they have to remember to update it for every new upstream
release. This is the sort of tedious-but-subtle work that we automate
because otherwise it will inevitably be incorrect after a few releases.
* The exact symbols used aren't visible to dpkg-shlibdeps. The maintainer
has to hard-code a version number that has all the required symbols.
Again, this is the sort of thing that we automate because it will
inevitably go wrong if done manually.
It also has some practical problems for upstreams:
* It adds a pile of code complexity. Maintainer attention is a scarce
resource :-)
* It moves any compatibility issues from compile-time (where only the
developer and packagers will experience them) to runtime (where end users
will experience them).
* If the library is present at runtime, but with an older version than at
compile-time, the code needs to be robust against that. This is the sort
of thing that a typical upstream will never test.
* It isn't entirely portable. On common OSs like GNU/* and Windows
(and I think macOS, but I'm less sure about that one), it happens to work,
but in some OSs there is a distinction between loadable modules and
shared libraries, and some upstreams aim to be portable to those OSs.
(See the libtool documentation for more than you could possibly want
to know about this topic.)
The pedantically correct way to have weak library dependencies is this
multi-level chain of linking, analogous to what is documented for APIs
that wrap dlopen() such as libltdl and GLib's GModule:
- eventual API user, e.g. /usr/bin/gnome-software
dlopen()s:
- a plugin intended to be dlopen()ed, e.g. libgs_plugin_flatpak-user.so
has DT_NEEDED on:
- libflatpak0
(For best portability, you'd use libltdl or GModule or similar instead
of direct dlopen().)
Having done that, either the plugin can either be split out into its own
package that is recommended or suggested by the main package (as was done
for gnome-software support for Flatpak), or the plugin's dependencies can
be downgraded to Recommends or Suggests with something like
"dh_shlibdeps -- -e/usr/lib/myplugins/myplugin.so -dRecommends" and it
will fail to dlopen if they are missing (as is done in at least iproute2 and
thunar, see https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=-dRecommends).
If a library dependency is sufficiently "heavy" that it needs to become
optional, please consider that approach.
S
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