[Filesystems-devel] Bug#793863: Add new package f2fs-tools-dev for external development use

[Vincent Cheng]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2015 at 5:05 AM, 殷啟聰 <seamlikok at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Cheng,
>
> Thanks for your reply. I am patching it to use existing Autotools
> mechanism to compile the libraries, but I have some questions.
>
> First, shall we add two new packages for libf2fs.so and
> libf2fs_format.so respectively, or shall we add only one new package
> named "f2fs-libs" to contain all libraries produced by this project? I
> can't decide because the original upstream author never meant to
> produce a libf2fs_format.so, which is simply a dynamic library version
> of mkfs.f2fs.

Debian Policy 8.1 [1] has this to say:

"If you have several shared libraries built from the same source tree,
you may lump them all together into a single shared library package
provided that all of their SONAMEs will always change together. Be
aware that this is not normally the case, and if the SONAMEs do not
change together, upgrading such a merged shared library package will
be unnecessarily difficult because of file conflicts with the old
version of the package. When in doubt, always split shared library
packages so that each binary package installs a single shared
library."

Either option is acceptable in this scenario (with the negligible
drawback of having to add a lintian override if you go for the single
package option). I don't particularly have a strong preference, but I
would point out that if you think it's possible that e.g. you may need
src:f2fs-tools to build additional libraries in the same manner in the
future, please go with the single shared library package approach (to
avoid having a dozen miniscule library packages with only a single
reverse dep).

> Second, If we are making two packages for two libraries, why not name
> them like "libf2fs1" instead of "libf2fs0"? The produced .so files are
> versioned 0.0.0 because the author did not configure for the version
> number, so Libtool simply uses the default one. When installing the
> .so files and the symlinks, we can use dh-exec to substitute the
> version number.

"libf2fs0" was just meant as an example regarding package naming conventions.

Regards,
Vincent

[1] https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-sharedlibs.html