Re: removal of .la files from Debian and a possible solution to the libtool shared libs problem

[Russ Allbery]

Bob Friesenhahn <address@hidden> writes:

> How would you like to deal with the case where a library has multiple
> usable dependencies, which satisify identical purposes, but via
> different possible libraries?

>                          libfoo-ssl_fast.so
>   myprog --> somelib -->     or
>                          libfoo-ssl_slow.so

> Note that in this case myprog depends on somelib and so that is an
> explicit dependency.  However somelib needs some symbols from a library
> that the user selects at link time.

In this one particular case, an explicit dependency seems reasonable.

This case is exceptionally rare.  In all the years that I've worked on
free software and packaging of software for multiple different versions of
UNIX, I've never wanted to do this, and I don't know of any case in the
thousands of packages in Debian where this technique is used.  Normally
it's easier and more robust to just build two different versions of
somelib, one for each of the alternative dependency libraries.  (See, for
instance, how cURL is handled in Debian.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>