I am trying to understand the regex rules in the function split_soname from dkpg-shlibdeps.pl. Working with an old corporate code base that has yet to adopt any versioning, all of the shared objects are named <object>.so. When attempting to package on a box that does not yet have the dependent packages installed dpkg-shlibdeps will throw warnings, "dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: couldn't find library <lib>.so needed by ..." but packaging will still succeed. We have few shared objects that have ".so." as part of their name. When dpkg- shlibdeps encounters these dependencies the warning becomes an error, "dpkg- shlibdeps: error: couldn't find library <lib>.so needed by ..." and packaging fails. I traced this down to the split_soname function which checks 2 regex comparisons. The shared objects that only throw warnings fall into the "else" clause of the function. The ones that fail fall into the first if clause which as regex 1. What were these regexs meant to match?
regex 1 (/^(.*)\.so\.(.*)$/): was this meant to capture shared objects with so number and revisons such as libc.6 or libbz2.so.1.0.4? If so, should the values after "so" be restricted to numbers? regex 2 (/^(.*)-(\d.*)\.so$/) The terminating so on this regex helps limit its capture but again should the groups be limited to digits only? I have tried searching for inforamtion related to to naming conventions for shared library names but the best I can come up with is that they need to be prefixed with "lib" and suffixed with ".so" and possibly the so number and revision. A name such as "libcom.debian.foo.bar.so" should be valid. If not I would appreciate being pointed to such requirements. I am willing to create a patch but before I assume I know what it "should" be doing I wanted to see how the maintainers felt.
