Chris Lamb <[email protected]> writes: > Dear Simon et al.,
>> Was the goal of this tag to tell the difference between libraries that >> are linked to their dependencies, and libraries that aren't, like the >> difference between these? >> >> $ gcc -shared -Wl,-soname,libbad.so.0 -olibbad.so.0 libhello.c `pkg- >> config --cflags glib-2.0` >> $ gcc -shared -Wl,-soname,libgood.so.0 -olibgood.so.0 libhello.c `pkg- >> config --cflags --libs glib-2.0` > I'm afraid I simply don't know and alas am simply not well-versed > enough in shared library foo to make any kind of judgement or even > comment; just playing the "triager" role. Can another lintian developer > chime in here? My recollection is that Simon is correct and we added this tag to try to find shared libraries that weren't linked to any of their dependencies. At the time, we made the assumption that nearly every shared library would use *something* from libc and thus have to be linked to it. > Random thought; if this just affects "gnome packages", can we just skip > those? (If so, how?) Maybe exclude shared libraries linked with glib (and whatever the Qt equivalent is)? I think it's still true that nearly every library is going to require *some* implementation of basic string handling, memory management, etc.; it's just that for a lot of GNOME stuff all of that is done by glib wrappers instead of directly by libc, and presumably something similar for Qt. It's also possible that subsequent tooling changes have made the original problem less likely and we don't need this tag at all. The tag is detecting something that's not technically wrong -- there's no reason why a shared library needs to be linked to anything at all. It's just assuming the NEEDED metadata is erroneously missing even though the library has undefined symbols, as opposed to a shared library that really doesn't need other libraries. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
