Re: shlibs file
Zvi Dubitzky wrote:
> I understand the role of the Depends: section in the control file
> information area of a .deb package - it specifies on what other
> libraries ( and their minimum version)
> But what is the role of the shlibs file ?
Basically, to contain sufficient (and hopefully correct) information
for dpkg-shlibdeps (and wrappers like dh_shlibdeps) in order to be
able to generate the needed substvars of a binary package that depends
on a particular library at build time. This is the so called "shlibs"
mechanism, slowly being replaced by the more advanced and not-so-new
"symbols" support in dpkg, which unfortunately is not applicable for
some programming languages (and for some others, not so convenient to
use (and for libraries with only a few reverse dependencies, not a
real improvement but a maintenance burden)).
> But this is obvious because we deal /just produced the package that
> contains this library.
If you (plan to) maintain a library, think from the standpoint of the
*users* of the library, not merely as a maintainer of the library
package. There are many things that can go wrong when you do the
ungrateful job of maintaining a library for Debian, but having this in
mind surely helps in many situations.
It is not obvious at all (to dpkg and the maintainer of a hypothetical
program using the library) what should be put in the Depends: field of
a package linking against libfoo; you as a maintainer of the libfoo
package ought to make a sound decision when providing/keeping
up-to-date correct shlibs or symbols files.
> Or maybe this information is used later
No.
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