On Sat, Feb 15, 2003 at 08:58:00AM +0200, Kai Henningsen wrote: > We have too many conflicting -dev packages. Yes, and it's bloody hard to fix. There are two problems involved for C libraries (and analogous ones for others) - the symlink in /usr/lib, and the headers. > Suppose I had two projects - one wanting to use Berkeley DB 4.1, one for > an Apache module. I'd need to constantly reinstall the various -dev > packages because apache-dev depends on libdb2-dev, and libdb2-dev and > libdb4.1-dev conflict. A lot of people would be very happy if you could think of a sane solution to the libdb problem. Almost every different version changes the API, the ABI, and the on-disk file format, without changing the location or name of the C headers. Actually solving this problem is hard. Ideally, upstream developers would create libraries and packages which don't conflict, and which can find the right headers and libraries to link against with a minimum of fuss. Unfortunately, there's a problem: They don't. > [1] And, incidentally, there are some shared library packages which > conflict between versions. These should be stamped out as well. Yes, same problem. I'm fairly convinced that this can't be solved unless upstream developers get a clue. Furthermore, I suspect that the problems lie only with a small number of libraries. It might be interesting if somebody were to investigate in detail which ones are responsible. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | Dept. of Computing, `. `' | Imperial College, `- -><- | London, UK
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