retitle 587612 d-shlibs: bogusly considers private symbols severity 587612 wishlist thanks (bcc'ed control@)
On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 02:52:27PM +0200, Fabian Greffrath wrote:
The section of Debian Policy that you quote deals with shared libraries. I'll try to explain my concern in an example a bit less complex than libavcodec-dev:A shared library "libfoo0" makes use of symbols of another library "liba0" and is thus linked against it. However, in our case libfoo0 does not export (parts of) liba's symbols via its own interface (i.e. it does not reference liba's headers in its own exported headers). That is, if an application "bar" uses symbols from libfoo0 that in turn make use of symbols from liba0 - but bar does not use the symbols from liba0 directly - then there is no need to link bar against liba0. It is sufficient to link bar against libfoo0 which in turn is linked against liba0. As a consequence, the application does not need to build-depend on the liba-dev package.
Thanks, I think I understand now: only public API should be taken into account, not all symbols embedded in the shared library.
I agree, that d-shlibs do not fully automate dependency resolving, due to this. I do consider more of a wishlist item than a bug, however: As the long description says, d-devlibdeps only *tries* to list the development library dependencies - i.e. it is a helper tool which might need some tuning in each use case.
If you have ideas to automate the process of skipping private symbols, they are obviously quite appreciated.
Even as-is I find d-shlibs quite useful, also for packages that might need some custom "silencing" (e.g. using the --override option), as it helps reveal some dependencies that might be missed with fully manual routines.
I have now lowered severity and retitled according to my understanding of this issue. Please do clarify if you disagree with the judgement - or if perhaps you feel that I still didn't properly understand your point.
Kind regards, - Jonas -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private
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