Bug#925540: qhull: add libqhullcpp to installed libraries

[D Haley]

Hi and thanks for the quick feedback,

> Normally we don't install static libraries in Debian. Shared libraries
> need to have SONAMES, and hopefully fairly stable ABIs. Do you know if
> those conditions are met? If so, it would need to be in a seperate
> package named after the SONAME.

Upstream's comment in their release notes are:
"Qhull's C++ interface is likely to change.  Stay current with GitHub.".
  [1] So, no there is no upstream SONAME, and the ABI is declared
unstable. However, updates to qhull are historically at most yearly.

As a downstream consumer of the library, this is unfortunate for me.

However, Policy (8.3) [2] is that the static may be installed,
particularly if the ABI is unstable, but doesn't really say anything
about not installing the static at all?

The current behaviour is - no static nor shared for the C++ interface,
but both for the C interface...

$ apt-file show libqhull-dev | grep 'lib/'
libqhull-dev: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libqhull.a
libqhull-dev: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libqhull.so
libqhull-dev: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libqhull_r.so
libqhull-dev: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libqhullstatic_r.a

So we could take out libqhull*.a, or add libqhullcpp*.a? Maybe I'm
missing something, and omitting libqhullcpp is a deliberate choice?

Thanks.

[1] http://www.qhull.org/README.txt
[2] https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-sharedlibs.html

On 10/10/2019 18:39, David Bremner wrote:
> D Haley <mycae at gmx.com> writes:
>
>>
>> The Qhull package does not install the libqhullcpp shared libraries. The
>> headers are installed, but the library is built statically, and does
>> not get installed.
>>
>> I have attached a patch against ea54d22bba5fb2cedf106a58bd11904370bfeb4f,
>> which changes the library to shared and adds it to the relevant .install
>> files.
>
>
>
> d
>