Re: Depending on both runtime and dev packages?
Martin Meredith wrote:
> Kevin B. McCarty wrote:
>> Davide Puricelli wrote:
>>
>>> Hi, I'm building a package (a Scheme-to-C compiler) and I split it into
>>> three different debs: libfoo0 (runtime libs), libfoo-dev (.a and .la
>>> files and includes) and foo-bin (compiler and other tools).
>>> The depends are a big problem: foo-bin needs to depend on libfoo0
>>> (otherwise the compiler won't run) but without the -dev package you
>>> won't be able to convert a Scheme file into a C one, so a Depends on
>>> libfoo-dev is needed, too: I don't think someone will ever use a program
>>> just to see the -help screen.
>> I think there is no problem. It seems perfectly OK to me for the
>> compiler package to depend upon both the runtime lib and the development
>> package for the language. For instance, the package g77-3.4 (a FORTRAN
>> compiler) depends upon the development version of the FORTRAN library,
>> libg2c0-dev, because that package is necessary to compile FORTRAN
>> programs. (It doesn't depend upon the libg2c0 runtime package, but that
>> is because g77 is not itself written in FORTRAN.)
> Dont most -dev packages auto-depend on the libs they're assosciated with
> anyway?
Yes.
So in Davide's case, foo-bin is going to have a dependency on both the
runtime lib in libfoo0 (from ${shlibs:Depends}) as well as on the
development package libfoo-dev (which the packager includes in the
Depends list manually). You could argue that the dependency on libfoo0
is redundant; but it would be hard to leave it out since it gets added
through the shlibs mechanism.
In the specific case of g77-3.4, g77-3.4 has a dependency on
libg2c0-dev, which in turn depends on libg2c0 as you say. But g77-3.4
doesn't itself use libg2c0 even though it happens to be an indirect
dependency.
I hope I didn't confuse things further with this attempted explanation...
regards,
--
Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@princeton.edu> Physics Department
WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University
GPG: public key ID 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544
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