[Debian-med-packaging] Correct handling of single-.so libraries

[Sascha Steinbiss]

Hi Kevin,

> I'm having trouble working out how to correctly follow the Debian policy
> regarding packaging of shared object libraries. If upstream only provides a
> single .so, with no versioned symlinks, how does one install this correctly? I
> assume this is a simple and common problem, but I can't find notes about *how*
> to do this in any policy, only that you *must* do this.

I have also run into this problem when packaging my own upstream project
GenomeTools, which also builds a shared library in addition to executables.
We don't use Autotools or the like, and never really cared much about
SONAMEs and versioned libraries, so I added this during packaging
(reminding me that I should probably add this to the upstream Makefile
as well... ;))

> If anyone knows of a package which solves this problem, let me know and I'll
> study it.

You can take a look at the genometools patches [1] to see what I did
(just manually setting linker flags and symlinking). Maybe there are
cleaner ways, but that seemed to work for me (and for packages using the
library, such as ltrsift).

Cheers
Sascha

[1]
http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-med/trunk/packages/genometools/trunk/debian/patches/adding_soname?view=markup


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