Bug#55730: Changes in handling library dependencies
[I think that some version of the original message should be posted at
some point to -devel-announce, probably once the new dpkg-shlibdeps is
installed in woody. We also might need some NMUs if this occurs
during the potato freeze and many developers are working on frozen
rather than unstable machines.]
On Wed, Jan 19, 2000 at 03:56:15PM +0100, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
> Package: debian-policy
>
> In woody dpkg will use a different method to determine on which
> libraries a package should depend. Until now dpkg-shlibdeps has
> used the output of ldd to determine which libraries are needed.
> This will be changed to using objdump. This however changes
> will need a couple of changes in the way that packages are build.
I am a little concerned about one point in this change, and that is
the transition period and partial upgrades. I have a sort of
suggestion, but let's see what people think.
How do we ensure that someone upgrading a package from potato to woody
pulls in all of the required libraries? As a "concrete" example,
/usr/bin/foo in the foo package depends upon libbar directly and
libbar depends upon libbaz indirectly. In potato, libbar does not
declare a dependency upon libbaz, although it will in woody.
Now the user decides that they wish to install foo, for some reason
they choose to install the unstable foo. Now they will need to
install libbar to fulfill foo's dependencies, but the potato libbar
doesn't depend upon libbaz.
Obvious solution: the shlibs file in any library package (say libbar
in this example) must declare a dependency: libbar (>=version number)
where the version number must be *at least the first version which was
packaged using the new dpkg-shlibdeps*. Then when foo is compiled
against libbar in woody, it will depend upon the woody libbar, and
thus bring into play all of the sub-dependencies.
Julian
--
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://www.debian.org/~jdg
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