On Thu, 19 Mar 2009 00:14:43 -0700, Alex wrote: > Hi there, > > The packaging guidelines: > > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Devel_Packages > > recommend that unversioned .so libraries should go into a -devel > package. I'm reviewing a package, eclib, that has no versioned .so > libraries at all: > > http://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=476398 > > To satisfy the review requirements submitter put the .so into a -devel > package and suppressed the main eclib package, as there are no > versioned .so to package. *sigh* Happens regularly. What matters is _when_ these .so files are used, not what their name is. For an ordinary shared library with a versioned SONAME stored in its header, the .so file is just a symlink, which is needed only when compiling software. Very roughly, a linker argument such as "-lfoo" resolves to adding either "libfoo.so" or "libfoo.a". If, on the contrary, the .so file is the main library, it would also need to be present at run-time. In run-time linker's search path, if applications are linked with the library directly. Or in private paths, if the library is some kind of plug-in, which is opened by the application itself. > It seems to make more sense to actually > remove the -devel package and include them in the main eclib package. True. > The guidelines don't appear to cover the case of packages that only > consist of unversioned .so's. So far it is being assumed that packagers and/or reviewers know what they are doing. For anyone else it's a pitfall. > Ideally upstream would add the > versioning, but currently don't support versioning the library. Why? Because the API is not stable? It would be better then to include a library version [or patch-level] into the library SONAME. That way, library updates [accompanied with proper SONAME updates] would require dependencies to be rebuilt/relinked. -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
