Bug#83669: Shared libraries

[Henrique M Holschuh <hmh@debian.org>]

On Fri, 26 Jan 2001, Ben Collins wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 07:34:08PM +0000, Ian Jackson wrote:
> >  foo-dev (2.1)  /usr/include/foo.h
> >                 /usr/lib/libfoo.so              (copy of actual library)
> 
> Can we say archive, system, mirror and update bloat horror!? DO you
> realize what this would mean for lib packages like xlibs and libc6? I

In other words, if this bug is deemed to be correct, we will have to add
hard-link support to dpkg and .debs. Anything else will simply DOUBLE the
already bloated */lib and the archive. Such doubling is NOT acceptable
(IMHO, but it seems that at least BenC agrees with me).

And I'm told adding hard-link support to dpkg is severely non-trivial (not
to mention the resulting .debs would probably be absolutely non-compatible
with older dpkg binaries, which may be a serious issue in itself).

Setting up a chroot jail is an acceptable way to deal with the problem for
developers (although it can be VERY painful in terms of disk-space), and
learning to apt-get source -b is an acceptable way to deal with the problem
for users that just 'have' to fetch that single package from unstable, IMHO.

Maybe we could work on making these two tasks simpler and properly
documented instead?  at least we'd have it finished for woody instead of
woody+3. 

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh