Bug#982147: mgba: Please provide a libmgba-dev package

[Ryan Tandy]

Control: severity -1 wishlist

Hello, thanks for the suggestion.

What is the software that would like to use this? Is it (or would it 
eventually be) in Debian?

What is libmgba's ABI policy? Currently we use libmgba as a "private" 
library; only the frontends built from the same source link it, with 
tight version constraints. I guess shipping a -dev package would require 
making the library package public, and versioning it appropriately. It 
looks like libmgba's SONAME is derived from its version (i.e.  
"libmgba.so.0.8") and does not reflect libtool-style versioning? Does 
mgba's author commit to ABI compatibility within the scope of a release 
branch?

(If it is attached to the release version that way, I'd have thought 
it's more conventional to name it e.g. "libmgba-0.8.so.0", but that's 
upstream's decision of course...)

In short, it's easy to ship some headers and a .so symlink, but I'm 
somewhat more hesitant about making libmgba into a public library, when 
it's not obvious to me that it's meant to be used that way, so I'd 
appreciate any links to where I can read about upstream's intent.

thanks,
Ryan