Bug#643658: About geos C/C++ dependencies

[Francesco P. Lovergine]

Package: libgeos-dev
Version: 3.2.2-3
Severity: important

This is a reminder about a discussion I had with strk (geos and postgis 
contributor). Thanks for his summary.

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So, I've realized Debian is shipping a single -dev package
for the GEOS library, while we have a separation between
a stable library and an unstable one.

The stable library is libgeos_c.{so,a} and has the same
SONAME since GEOS 2.2.0. This library goes with the
libgeos_c.h stable API header.

The unstable library is libgeos-xxx.{so,a}.

The C library is there for the specific purpose of
being stable and all applications are recommended to link
against _that_ library rather than againts the C++ one.

By shipping a single -dev package you can't encode the
fact that an application is dependent on the C library
but not on the C++ one. Also, you force installation
of a lot of header files which are only part of the C++
interface (not the C, stable, one).

Each libgeos-c package would depend on a specific version
of a libgeos package, and hopefully become the only package
dependent on it.

By having dependencies properly encoded, you'd save rebuild of
applications which only depend on the C, stable, library on
every new release of GEOS.
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-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 3.0.0-1-686-pae (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=it_IT.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=it_IT.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages libgeos-dev depends on:
ii  libgeos-3.2.2  3.2.2-3
ii  libgeos-c1     3.2.2-3

libgeos-dev recommends no packages.

Versions of packages libgeos-dev suggests:
ii  libgdal-doc  1.7.3-6

-- no debconf information

-- 
Francesco P. Lovergine