amendment to shared library policy

[Jack Howarth <howarth@bromo.msbb.uc.edu>]

Looking at the number of shared libraries in Debian which prelink
has revealed to have undefined non-weak symbols (through incorrect
linkage), I think we need an amendment to clarify Debian policy on
such symbols. In a nut-shell, the policy should be that "No shared
library shall contain undefined non-weak symbols unless it is known
such symbols will be provided by the program dlopen'ing said library".
Matching this policy, dh_shlibdeps should be performing a 'ldd -d -r'
on each library in a package and issuing a warning if undefined 
symbols are detected. The warning issued by dh_shlibdeps should be
simply that "Additional linkage *may* be required for this shared
library". 
                     Jack
ps Regardless of what one thinks of the concept of prelinking
in Debian, everyone should agree that prelink is the best tool
yet provided to sanity check binaries/libraries for linkage issues.
Also, Daniel Jacobowitz agrees this proposal sounds reasonable. 

:q