[RFC] xulrunner, shlibs, and dependencies.

Steve Langasek vorlon at debian.org
Sat Dec 3 01:52:03 UTC 2005


On Fri, Dec 02, 2005 at 08:47:47PM +0100, Mike Hommey wrote:

> As you may or may not know, I'm currently working on packaging
> xulrunner, which is ought to be the central point for all future mozilla
> technology, meaning that at more or less long term, all mozilla products
> (firefox, thunderbird, etc.) will be built on top of it.
> That will be indeed a great improvment in both memory (who really wants
> to have libraries loaded twice just because you run 2 of their programs)
> and security management.

I think this question is more suited for debian-devel than for
debian-release, fwiw.  Library packaging is not the exclusive responsibility
of the release team. :)

> So my idea is the following :
> - First, I want to provide the libs with a correct soname. It won't be
> compatible with upstream until some people use clue sticks, but i'll do
> my best for them to improve on that point. Having a correct soname will
> enable us to actually use the shlibs mecanism.

> - Now, the problem is that we can't really use the sonames correctly,
> because if we succeed in the clue stick batting, we'll have different
> sonames, which, in the long term, would be painful. So, I'd like to
> provide a dummy gecko-x.y-serial or such package, which would correctly
> depend on the libxul package (with strict version if necessary), and the
> .shlibs in the libxul-dev package would say to depend on the
> gecko-x.y-serial package.

If you don't want to make up sonames (and I think having debian-specific
sonames is fine, personally), I think that having libxul provide a virtual
package to use in dependencies is the best option (whether that's
gecko-x.y-serial, or libxul1debianX, makes no real difference).

There are two advantages to managing sonames even when upstream does not:
it lets you interface better with un-packaged software (but *only* if that
software is built against the Debian version!), and it allows
co-installability of different library versions.  You need to decide whether
these features are important enough for your application to warrant spinning
your own sonames.  (My guess is no.)

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon at debian.org                                   http://www.debian.org/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-mozilla-maintainers/attachments/20051202/22f50c98/attachment.pgp


More information about the pkg-mozilla-maintainers mailing list