[RFC] xulrunner, shlibs, and dependencies.

[Mike Hommey]

On Sat, Dec 03, 2005 at 12:28:36AM -0800, Steve Langasek <vorlon at debian.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 03, 2005 at 08:58:45AM +0100, Mike Hommey wrote:
> > > > 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).
> 
> > Will all the tools resolving the dependencies be fine with a dependency
> > on a virtual package without one an a real package ? (like for
> > zlib1g-dev | libz-dev)
> 
> Yes.  See apt's Provides for an example of this.

So why do we keep providing transition packages, then ?

> > > 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.)
> 
> > My concern is more about what it becomes when we hopefully get upstream
> > to use sonames. Someone suggested me to use specific sonames like
> > libxul.so.d1. Does that really work ? Do shlibs work as well with that ?
> 
> > If this is the case, I think i have my solution...
> 
> Yes, sonames can be more or less arbitrary strings.  You can certainly use
> sonames with "debian" in them with a fairly high degree of confidence that
> upstream won't collide with them.

THAT is cool.

Mike