.so's in devel packages...

[Michael Schwendt]

On Mon, 18 Jun 2012 12:25:12 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:

> On Mon, 2012-06-18 at 18:23 +0100, Nelson Marques wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > 
> > I have a doubt regarding the '.so's' in devel packages... From my
> > understanding they go in devel packages to allow the installation of
> > several packages with different versioning....
> 
> Not really, no. They go in -devel packages because the only time it's
> actually appropriate to use a library by referring to its unversioned
> name is when you're compiling another application against it. It's never
> safe for anything to access a library at runtime via an unversioned name
> because there is no guarantee of stability; you can't be at all sure
> that the version of the library you're calling is actually capable of
> doing what you're asking it to do. Since the only use of the unversioned
> 'instance' (symlink, in Fedora...) of a library is in development,
> naturally it goes in the devel package. We can take advantage of this in
> generating dependencies, and we do, which is why it's important not to
> put the .so file in a runtime package, or that runtime package will get
> a bunch of automatically generated dependencies on -devel packages.

And again, this is not the full story. There is no hard rule on where 
non-versioned .so files are to be packaged. They could still be local libs
(with no API for public consumption) strictly required by an application.
They could still be plug-ins, libraries loaded by an application at
run-time. They could even be symlinks to versioned plug-in libs, with
the application strictly requiring the non-versioned symlink when trying
to link with a plug-in at run-time. 

Where .so files are to be put solely depends on their purpose. Many
non-versioned libfoo.so files are just the symlink that make -lfoo work
during compilation/linking. But that is not sufficient to require *all*
non-versioned .so files to be placed in -devel packages.

If Fedora Packaging Guidelines are still not clear about this, we may need
another update for them. But detailed feedback on them would be appreciated
first, IMHO.

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