Bug#553109: guile-gnutls: postinst-must-call-ldconfig /usr/lib/libguile-gnutls-v-1.so.0.0.0 by the dynamic library loader. Therefore, the package must call "ldconfig" in its postinst script.

[Neil Jerram]

Ludo / Andy,

Is it still the case that we recommend guile extensions to be installed
as normal libraries in /usr/lib, as opposed to some guile-specific
place?  I think you were recently discussing this, and I'm afraid I
didn't pay complete attention.

(Historically this has cropped up several times.  Marius favoured
/usr/lib on the grounds that it could make sense for some application to
use a Guile extension library just like a normal C library
(i.e. application coded in C, linking at build time to the extension
library and to libguile).  But on the other hand the advantage of
somewhere like /usr/lib/guile-1.8 is that it makes it easier to handle
parallel installation, and corresponding correct version numbering,
without having to have .so names that have both libguile and extension
version numbers in.

My view on this is not very strong, but is that by sticking to /usr/lib
we do seem to be sailing against the wind (cf. other scripting
languages); and also that the normal C library argument feels unlikely
in practice.)

Please see email below, and the debian bug, for the complete context of
this.

Regards,
        Neil

Simon Josefsson <simon at josefsson.org> writes:

> Manoj Srivastava <srivasta at debian.org> writes:
>
>> On Thu, Oct 29 2009, Andreas Metzler wrote:
>>
>>
>>> These are not proper shared libraries but are dlopened bindings for
>>> guile, which takes them outside the scope of the abovementioned part of
>>> policy.
>>
>>         Then should they not be in a private path? As long as they are
>>  in the public library directories, you are still under the policy
>>  directive, as far as I can see.
>
> Other guile packages appear to put shared libraries in /usr/lib too, for
> example:
>
> jas at mocca:~$ dpkg -L guile-1.8-libs|grep /usr/lib|head
> /usr/lib
> /usr/lib/libguilereadline-v-17.so.17.0.3
> /usr/lib/libguile-srfi-srfi-13-14-v-3.la
> /usr/lib/libguile-srfi-srfi-4-v-3.so.3.0.1
> /usr/lib/libguile.so.17.3.1
> /usr/lib/libguile-srfi-srfi-60-v-2.so.2.0.2
> /usr/lib/libguile-srfi-srfi-4-v-3.la
> /usr/lib/libguilereadline-v-17.la
> /usr/lib/libguile-srfi-srfi-13-14-v-3.so.3.0.1
> /usr/lib/libguile-srfi-srfi-1-v-3.so.3.0.2
> jas at mocca:~$ 
>
> Although generally I would agree with you that if these aren't normal
> libraries, putting them in another directory (/usr/lib/guile) would be
> nice.  But there may be reasons why that is not possible; I'm not a
> guile expert.  Anyway, it doesn't seem to be a problem specific to the
> guile-gnutls package.
>
> /Simon