Debian Bug report logs - #192008
dpkg-dev: dependencies from libtool and pkg-config files

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Subject: Bug#192008: dependencies from libtool and pkg-config files
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From: Michel Dänzer <[email protected]>
To: Joey Hess <[email protected]>
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On Thu, 2003-08-21 at 22:33, Joey Hess wrote: 
> I don't feel that parsing .la files will be useful. Not all packages use
> libtool. Anyway, there is nothing of value in those files that cannot be
> found in other ways.

Absolutely, I was probably too focussed on libtool because the problems
I saw were related to it.

> It might be possible to run objdump on the library to get the libraries
> a library links to, use heuristics to find the corresponding .so files,
> and from there dpkg -S to get -dev package names. But then you need to
> deal with cases like multiple -dev packages that can both serve for a
> library. You have to deal with special cases like libc6-dev, which the 
> above mechanism would always add to the dependnency list, and whch should 
> not be included. 

Anything covered by build-essential could be excluded?

> Sounds a lot like the shlibs files mechanism and dpkg-shlibdeps, 
> doesn't it?

Indeed, it's similar.

> Assuming all this is done (and it sounds like something that would
> belong in dpkg to me, as well as requiring modificatons of lots of -dev
> packages to provide the shlibs file equivilants), then you still 
> have to get all the packages to use the new debhelper utility and 
> modify their control files.

There's no need to convert all packages right away; getting these
dependencies right may well be easy for the majority of packages,
nevertheless the others seem to have caused considerable porting
headaches recently (that's the impression I got; I'll gladly be proved
wrong). The idea is that those packages which cause problems in this
area could use the new tool as they are discovered, instead of adding
more kludges which are bound to break again sooner or later.

> I think you would be better served by adding something to lintian to try
> to detect missing -dev dependnecies, and filing some bug reports. Unlike
> shared library dependnencies, -dev dependencies rarely change, and when
> they do, the package maintainer always has reason to know about it (they
> have to change the build dependnecies too).

But the main point of my proposal is exactly that packages should only
have to build-depend on packages they use directly, not also on other
packages those happen to depend on.

Similarly, if I want to write a program that uses say libpisock, I want
to just install libpisock-dev, I don't care that it needs
libreadline4-dev as well. And neither should the libpisock-dev
maintainer have to.


-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer   \  Debian (powerpc), XFree86 and DRI developer
Software libre enthusiast  \     http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=daenzer

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