[Fedora-packaging] Policy question: how tight should cross-subpackage Requires be?

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Tue, 2008-05-06 at 23:01 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams <ivazqueznet at gmail.com> writes:
> > On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 12:40 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> >> 1. Do nothing, rely on automatically generated requires (eg, the major
> >> version of a shared library's soname).  Maximum flexibility, maximum
> >> possibility of allowing installations that don't actually work.
> 
> > Show me a package that would break if a different version library was
> > used that has the same soname and I'll show you a developer that needs
> > to learn how to properly use sonames.
> 
> Hmm, you think a version digit or so is enough to encode everything
> there is to be known about a package?
Think of SONAMES in terms of APIs. Two packages providing a library with
the same SONAME must be API-compatible and remain API-compatible
throughout a distributions life-time.

Read "info libtool" for one approach to it.

More generally  speaking, version-numbers will never be enough to
"encode everything ... about a package".  They are a minimum, "necessary
requirement" and will need to be supported by further measures.

Which, depends on your individual case. For compile time deps,
"compile-time feature-checks" are an appropriate means, 
in other situations, you may use run-time checks, ... if all else fail,
you will need to resort to "conventions".

Ralf