Does every package which provides a library requires to provide unversioned copy of the library?

[Mattia Verga]

I have a question raised from an ongoing review process [1]: does every package which provides a library requires to provide unversioned copy of the library?
Here the libpasraw library only provides versioned copy of the library. It's just a private library which is used only by other projects from the same author which require the library only at runtime.

The reviewer asks me to patch the source code to provide an unversioned copy of the library and release it in a -devel subpackage. Is it mandatory to provide an unversioned copy of the lib?

Mattia

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1813563

[Petr Pisar]

On Sun, Mar 15, 2020 at 01:57:38PM -0000, Mattia Verga wrote:
> does every package which provides a library requires to provide unversioned
> copy of the library?

It does not need. But that makes the library pretty hostile to a standard use
of a dynamic library and that is a linking to it at build time.
> Here the libpasraw library only provides versioned
> copy of the library. It's just a private library which is used only by other
> projects from the same author which require the library only at runtime.

Then the library should not be installed into the standard path (%{_libdir}).
If the file is not for a public use, it only polutes the name space.

-- Petr

[Mattia Verga]

Thanks for the info, I'll ask upstream to move it to a private dir and take care of edit all his project accordingly.

Mattia