It is ok to have a hardcoded Depends: libc6-dev ?

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

Hi.

We have the shlibs mechanism for dependencies on shared libraries.
This allows a package to be compiled under libc5, libc6, or whatever libc,
and the right dependency info will be calculated automatically.

However, there are some packages having a hardcoded dependency on
libc6-dev, and it seems there is not a shlibs mechanism for that.


I ask this because GNU/Hurd does have "glibc2" and "glibc2-dev" (instead
of libc6 and libc6-dev). We will have an shlibs file for glibc2 so that
"Depends: glibc2" lines will be automatically generated by the shlibs
mechanism. But we will have to change all the hardcoded libc6-dev
dependencies by hand.

We can, of course, make glibc2-dev to provide libc6-dev (and we will
probably have to do that as a workaround in the meantime). However, I feel
this is not the right thing to do.

So: It is ok that a package depends on libc6-dev in a hardcoded way,
should that package depend on "libc-dev" instead, or is there (or
should be) any other way to do this in an elegant way?

Thanks.

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