Zvi Dubitzky wrote: > I understand the role of the Depends: section in the control file > information area of a .deb package - it specifies on what other > libraries ( and their minimum version)
> But what is the role of the shlibs file ? Basically, to contain sufficient (and hopefully correct) information for dpkg-shlibdeps (and wrappers like dh_shlibdeps) in order to be able to generate the needed substvars of a binary package that depends on a particular library at build time. This is the so called "shlibs" mechanism, slowly being replaced by the more advanced and not-so-new "symbols" support in dpkg, which unfortunately is not applicable for some programming languages (and for some others, not so convenient to use (and for libraries with only a few reverse dependencies, not a real improvement but a maintenance burden)). > But this is obvious because we deal /just produced the package that > contains this library. If you (plan to) maintain a library, think from the standpoint of the *users* of the library, not merely as a maintainer of the library package. There are many things that can go wrong when you do the ungrateful job of maintaining a library for Debian, but having this in mind surely helps in many situations. It is not obvious at all (to dpkg and the maintainer of a hypothetical program using the library) what should be put in the Depends: field of a package linking against libfoo; you as a maintainer of the libfoo package ought to make a sound decision when providing/keeping up-to-date correct shlibs or symbols files. > Or maybe this information is used later No. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87zkwq32oo.gnus_not_unix!%[email protected]
