Bug#54985: debian-policy: handling of shared libraries
Package: debian-policy
Version: 3.1.1.1
Severity: normal
Hi all,
Summary: -dev packages should actually provide a real libfoo.so,
rather than a symlink to the shared object provided by the runtime
package.
The object of this proposal is to divorce the version of the -dev
package from the version of the runtime. There are several reasons why
this is a good thing, and I'll illustrate one:
When slink was being burned onto CDs for other architectures, there
were some very irate bug reports against trn, since it depended on
libraries that were not available in slink; the bug was reported by
the m68k people, all of whose build daemons were using potato
libraries. It took quite a lot of time and effort to find a
slink-only machine that trn could be built on.
This policy change solves such problems - simply install the slink
-dev package(s), and away you go. What maintainers do about which
version of the shared object to provide is up to them. Some library
authors always ensure backwards-compatibility with their libraries, so
the situation is simplified; in other cases it may be advisable to
make the $distribution -dev package build binaries that can be run on
the $distribution-1 runtimes. In good libraries with
forward-compatible APIs, then the -dev .so can clearly be the same as
the runtime one. It should be noted that installing upgraded runtimes
should be harmless.
This is currently just looking for some sort of consensus; when that
is achieved, I'll put up a rewording of the relevant policy section.
-- System Information
Debian Release: potato
Kernel Version: Linux pick 2.2.13 #1 Fri Dec 3 09:43:29 GMT 1999 i686 unknown
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