proposal: treat plugins and shared libraries differently

[David Benson <daveb@idealab.com>]

IANAD.  But I want to be... :)

In any event, I hope the following
change can be made so my package 
(gdam at http://www.ffem.org/gdam)
can be made lintian clean.

=====================================================================


PROPOSAL:
	Shared libraries and "plugins" should be
	distinguished (and defined) explicitly by policy.

	The intent is that policy section 4.3 will
	no longer apply to plugins, just shared libraries.

PROPOSED CHANGE:

	I propose prepending text like the following to 
	section 4.3.

	
     Shared libraries are .so files containing compiled
     code that are loaded by the ld.so(5) library.
     They must always be installed in the directories listed
     in ld.so.conf.  (Applications may also have private .so files,
     often called `plugins', which are stored `/usr/lib/program_name';
     they are exempt from all the rules in this section, except that they
     must not be installed executable).


EXPLANATION:
	
	- The change is largely a clarification, since
	  the original text didn't define which files
	  exactly were shared-libraries.

	- There are many packages which could use this change
	  (some cited in bug #42399, which is also against lintian
	  about this problem):
	  mozilla, netscape, nessusd, quake-glide-libs,
	  gql.  Not sure exactly how many in total.

	- The considerations in section 4.3 largely pertain
	  to smoothly updating the shared-libraries
	  given the behavior of ld.so and ldconfig,
	  which are not used for plugins.


=====================================================================

Thanks for your time,

Dave Benson
daveb@ffem.org