Bug#571776: debian-policy: Libraries should be allowed to not provide shlibs when they provide symbols file
Summary: Debian Policy should gain documentation of the symbols file
format and a description of symbols in section 8.6 before shlibs, since
symbols are preferred where usable. The shlibs documentation should
remain, since shlibs are still required for udebs and are still widely
used in cases where writing symbols files is hard or spurious changes to
the exported symbols happen in ways that don't break library compatibility
for normal use (C++, for example). The format information should be taken
from deb-symbols(5) and refer to (but not document here) dpkg-gensymbols
for the other things one can do during symbol generation time. shlibs
files should probably be optional if symbols files are present, but there
will probably be further discussion of that.
I believe this bug (and the merged bug) are just waiting for someone to
have time to write that language, so I'm tagging them both proposal. (And
testing out the new BTS summary feature with this message.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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