More RFH: liblicense: Module symbols "found in none of the libraries"

[Asheesh Laroia <asheesh@asheesh.org>]

I'm (still) working on packaging liblicense. 
http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-mentors@lists.debian.org/msg54877.html 
has the previous discussion.  Thanks to everyone who helped.  To give a 
quick summary, liblicense is a library that reads and writes license 
metadata out of e.g. MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and PDF files.  The reason for its 
existence is to let other programmers build on top of it and pretend that 
there is a unified API to the various metadata standards and formats, at 
least as far as license information.

A more current DSC is available at 
http://mentors.workaround.org/debian/pool/main/l/liblicense/liblicense_0.6-1.dsc 
.

I want to ask a particular question here:  My package (for which I am 
upstream) makes some interesting complaints from dpkg-shlibdeps after it 
builds:

	dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: symbol LL_E_MODULE_WRITE_FAIL used by
	debian/liblicense2/usr/lib/liblicense/0.6/io/sidecar_xmp.so found in none
	of the libraries.
	dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: symbol LL_WEBSTATEMENT used by
	debian/liblicense2/usr/lib/liblicense/0.6/io/sidecar_xmp.so found in none
	of the libraries.
	dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: symbol LL_MORE_PERMISSIONS used by
	debian/liblicense2/usr/lib/liblicense/0.6/io/sidecar_xmp.so found in none
	of the libraries.

and so on.

Now, to give some background - these modules do work!  liblicense.so is 
responsible for determining e.g. what license a file claims it is under. 
As a user of liblicense, you might call ll_read() on a filename you pass 
in - liblicense detects the file type and dlopen()s a .so that handles 
files of that type.

So this /usr/lib/liblicense/0.6/io/sidecar_xmp.so file is a "module" that 
refers to symbols that are not contained in it.  That's expected by me - 
because the symbols it needs are guaranteed to be available when it is 
dlopen()'d by liblicense.so.

So what should I do?

(I'm still working on Paul Wise's advice to use Symbols Files as per 
http://wiki.debian.org/UsingSymbolsFiles 
<http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-mentors@lists.debian.org/msg54887.html>.)

Thanks!

-- Asheesh.

P.S. It occurred to me that maybe I should link sidecar_xmp.so with 
-llicense, but that seemed curiously incestuous if liblicense.so would 
dlopen() it....

--
Zippy's brain cells are straining to bridge synapses ...