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Re: Debian diff / Debian Policy (-dev)



On Sat, Dec 20, 2003 at 03:25:10PM +0000, n.v.t n.v.t wrote:
> I noticed that dh_make doesn't create diffs , why is that? Is there a way 
> to (re)generate the the *.diff.gz ?

dpkg-source does this. dh_make simply makes a debian/ skeleton for you.

> How to decide which cflags could be use best? Since dh_make created "-O2 
> -Wall -g" , I can see the point of -O2 -Wall , but what's the point of -g ? 
> Will that be enough to debug the package? If that peace of software has 
> different flags how do I deal with that? Do I just replace those CFLAGS 
> with the "-O2 -Wall -g" ones?

-O2 is required by policy unless it breaks the program on
$RANDOM_ARCHITECTURE. -g adds debugging information, but usually it's
stripped out at build time by dh_strip.

> What do I do when a user tells me a binary is segment faulting? How do i 
> find the bug, or should I forward something like that to the official 
> programmer of that peace of software?

Usually, you try to make them get a backtrace from gdb, and then it's a
lot easier to figure out from there. Unfortunately optimizatoin might
confuse gdb, so it may not be as useful as one might think.

> - What's the point of make -dev packages? Is it about the amount of space? 
> Where can I find a
>  more verbose explanation about creating/(separating -dev files)?

It's so people can use the shared library to run the programs that need
it without bloating the system with potentially large static libraries
and header files.

> -Why is it that libgdbm.so is going to be symlinked to libgdbm.so.3.0.0? 
> Why not a symlink from
> libgdbm.so.3.0.0 to libgdbm.so?
> "This symlink is needed by the linker (ld) when compiling packages, as it 
> will only look for libgdbm.so when compiling dynamically."

This is because people do 'gcc <yadda yadda yadda> -lgdbm' and not 'gcc
<yadda yadda yadda> /usr/lib/libgdbm.so.3.0.0' in general.

> -Why is ld only looking for libgdm.so when it's compiled dynamically?

Because that's the simplest way of doing things :P

-- 
Joshua Kwan

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