[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#595613: Moving all EMBOSS libraries to /usr/lib/emboss/lib ?

[Charles Plessy]

Le Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 11:32:06PM +0200, Julien Cristau a écrit :
> > 
> If the libraries are used outside of their own source package (which is
> the case here for embassy-*, AIUI), then they are not private, and need
> to be versioned correctly so those other packages can link against them
> and get proper dependencies.

Policy's chapter 8 contains:

  ‘This section deals only with public shared libraries: shared libraries that
  are placed in directories searched by the dynamic linker by default or which
  are intended to be linked against normally and possibly used by other,
  independent packages.’

The emboss and embassy packages have the same uptream maintainer, who develops
and releases them together, and the same Debian maintainers. I think that it is
enough to say that these packages are not independant, and that the EMBOSS
libraries, which are not used by other programs, are private.

Upstream sometimes breaks backward compatibility, and I prefer deal with this
by re-uploading the embassy packages with tight dependancies each time a new
upstream EMBOSS package is released (once or twice a year).

The reason why the embassy packages in Testing got separated from the emboss
package against which they were built is that the emboss 6.2 library packages
did not contain symbols files (but from 6.3 they do), and that the emboss 6.3
packages had a RC bug (not buildable twice in a row) that blocked their
migration.

It is this accident that revealed that upstream broke backwards compatibility.
Otherwise, since EMBOSS and EMBASSY are released together, this was never
reported.

The changes you are asking for can not solve alone that problem. On the other
hand, they would require regular changes in package names because of soname
incrementations, and to maintain two versions of emboss in parallel.

Making the emboss libraries private do not solve alone the problem either, but
they will make the package conformant to the Policy. In parallel, poling them
in a single package will make the manual mainainance of embassy-* package's
dependancies easier.

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan