Re: Intent to package: [Biology] seqio library

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, Joel Klecker wrote:

> At 13:54 +0200 1999-03-24, Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho wrote:
> >On Wed, Mar 24, 1999 at 03:38:17AM -0800, Joel Klecker wrote:
> >> Policy says the -dev package is supposed to have the "soname" too.
> >
> >It's optional.
> >
> >Debian Policy 2.5.0.0 § 4.3: "... If you prefer only to support one
> >development version at a time you may name the development package
> >`<libraryname>-dev' ..."
> 
> I find that sort of inconsistency bothersome. That and policy's 
> incorrect usage of "soname".

On the contrary, I think that sometimes it is even good that only a
development version is available, this way you always know which is the
"good one" to be used.

Example:

libfoo3 is released and packaged for Debian and the old libfoo2 becomes
"obsolete".

Since libfoo3-dev is the "good one" (i.e. the preferred one to be used),
people have to remove libfoo2-dev and install libfoo3-dev.

Having just a single libfoo-dev, this is done automatically by dselect.
(i.e. it is upgraded from libfoo-dev_2 to libfoo-dev_3, since the package
didn't change its name).

Moreover, usually libfoo2-dev have to be made "extra" (since compiling
with an old library is a special requirement) and keep just libfoo3-dev as
"optional" (not to mention that they usually conflict and the soon-to-be
policy regarding conflicts forbids them between optional packages). Having
a single libfoo-dev, there is no need to change priorities up and down,
and there are no conflicts.

I think the real inconsistency is having several development -dev packages
around when we often only need the latest one, so I'm glad that the policy
actually allows having a single -dev package.

Thanks.

-- 
 "7531ecb0121e61f1554f29b4a4c681a1" (a truly random sig)