[Pkg-openldap-devel] Serious error in the packaging of OpenLDAP 2.3

[Steve Langasek]

[Dropping Quanah from Cc, sigh]

On Sat, Feb 24, 2007 at 06:49:23PM -0500, Stephen Frost wrote:
> * Steve Langasek (vorlon at debian.org) wrote:
> > Hmm.  Well, the .la files were dropped for a reason -- I just can't remember
> > now what the precise reason was, and there's little detail in the changelog.
> > Stephen, do you remember why this was done, and what problems reverting this
> > change might cause?

> My recollection was the general stupidity of them (as they're completely
> unnecessary...),

Well, in this case we see that they're not completely unneccessary --
they're necessary for compatibility with upstream documentation.  So all
other things being equal, we ought to ship them, at least until we can
suggest (& regression-test) upstream documentation fixes.

> there was some concern about them bringing in completely inappropriate
> Depends (like, the -dev depending on *every -dev package underneath*,
> even if not used directly), and the problems they cause when they're not
> *always* there (ie: they exist at some levels but not at others and
> libtool falls apart because of it).

We aren't shipping a slapd-dev package, so -dev dependencies can't be an
issue here.  We also don't care about opening these particular .la files
with libtool, they should only be opened with libltdl.  Are there any known
problems with libltdl3 traversing .la files looking for trouble?

I guess we don't have a solid answer to that, and probably should do some
testing.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon at debian.org                                   http://www.debian.org/