[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#510120: dcmtk: Missing link to libxml2 (libdcmsr)

[Mathieu Malaterre]

severity 510120 serious
thanks

On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 4:30 PM, Juergen Salk <jsa at debian.org> wrote:
> * Mathieu Malaterre <mathieu.malaterre at gmail.com> [081230 10:17]:
>
>> > I simply cannot reproduce the problem you described above. For me all dsr*
>> > applications that are part of the dcmtk package seems to be able to load
>> > libdcmsr without any problems ...
>>
>> Correct. I did not realize it was the responsability of the
>> application to do the full linking and provide libraries for the
>> missing symbols.
>
> Yes. Unfortunately the dcmtk library build system does not link
> its shared libraries with the shared libraries it depends on.  I
> am fully aware that this is not exactly desirable. The underlying
> reason for this is the totally unconventional dcmtk build system
> which is inherently much more inflexible than the standard GNU
> build system (including libtool). Actually, the upstream build
> system does not support building shared libraries at all (!) and
> it needed some some amount of kludgy "magic" to work around all
> these problems in order to provide shared libraries for Debian.
> This appeared to be the best balance between what is desireable
> and what is actually doable with reasonable efforts (i.e. without
> adding even more - potentially error prone - complexity to
> upstreams build system).
>
> I have met the OFFIS team personally a couple of months ago and
> took the chance to briefly discuss this issue with them.
> Unfortunately they are not going to change their build system
> (e.g. by introducing libtool) for the upcoming dcmtk release ...

I can understand the position for upstream but what really makes me
nervous is that we wont detect any ABI/API change. For instance:


$ apt-cache show libdcmtk2
[...]
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.2), libgcc1 (>= 1:4.1.1)

We should have it somewhere that libdcmtk2 as uploaded is using ABI
X.Y of libxml2. Thus setting severity to serious.

Thanks