Ubuntu
openldap package

Version number in package name makes life hard

Asked by Tim Nicholas

I'm sure this has been noted before but I can't find an explanation.

Why are non-major version numbers in the package names for the openldap libraries? Package names like 'libldap-2.4-2' seem to make it unnecessarily hard to package third party software with sensible dependencies.

Is there a good excuse for this?

I don't know a huge amount about debian packaging but is there an obvious way another package could specify something like "libldap > 2.3"? Would that be possible if the libldap2.4blahblah package had a 'provides' specification?

Cheers,
Tim

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This question was originally filed as bug #662398.

Revision history for this message
Arnaud Soyez (weboide) said : 		#1

I might not be 100% accurate and everyone is free to correct me... but here's the main idea:

The purpose is to avoid API and ABI breakage between your program and the library if there is a major .

Your package should actually only have build-depends to libldap2-dev in the debian/control file, and the packaging toolchain will automatically add a dependency to the specific binary package (libldap2.4-X) during the build process.

For example:
Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 7), libgstreamer0.10-dev, libxml2-dev, libglib2.0-dev

You might be also interested in http://sourceware.org/autobook/autobook/autobook_91.html (especially the "age")

Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#2

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.