On Mon, 18 Jun 2012 12:25:12 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote: > On Mon, 2012-06-18 at 18:23 +0100, Nelson Marques wrote: > > Hi all, > > > > > > I have a doubt regarding the '.so's' in devel packages... From my > > understanding they go in devel packages to allow the installation of > > several packages with different versioning.... > > Not really, no. They go in -devel packages because the only time it's > actually appropriate to use a library by referring to its unversioned > name is when you're compiling another application against it. It's never > safe for anything to access a library at runtime via an unversioned name > because there is no guarantee of stability; you can't be at all sure > that the version of the library you're calling is actually capable of > doing what you're asking it to do. Since the only use of the unversioned > 'instance' (symlink, in Fedora...) of a library is in development, > naturally it goes in the devel package. We can take advantage of this in > generating dependencies, and we do, which is why it's important not to > put the .so file in a runtime package, or that runtime package will get > a bunch of automatically generated dependencies on -devel packages. And again, this is not the full story. There is no hard rule on where non-versioned .so files are to be packaged. They could still be local libs (with no API for public consumption) strictly required by an application. They could still be plug-ins, libraries loaded by an application at run-time. They could even be symlinks to versioned plug-in libs, with the application strictly requiring the non-versioned symlink when trying to link with a plug-in at run-time. Where .so files are to be put solely depends on their purpose. Many non-versioned libfoo.so files are just the symlink that make -lfoo work during compilation/linking. But that is not sufficient to require *all* non-versioned .so files to be placed in -devel packages. If Fedora Packaging Guidelines are still not clear about this, we may need another update for them. But detailed feedback on them would be appreciated first, IMHO. -- Fedora release 17 (Beefy Miracle) - Linux 3.4.2-4.fc17.x86_64 loadavg: 0.52 0.77 0.44 -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
