Re: Requirements for specifying dependencies on libraries

[David Holland <dholland-pkgtech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 05:03:45PM +0100, Jens Rehsack wrote:
 > > I find this a bit strange.  Are you saying that the perl module
 > > distribution (that lives in CPAN, that a packaging system like pkgsrc
 > > would download, or that a user would) would really have a baked-in
 > > requirement for major version 20 of a shlib?  Would it also have the
 > > path baked in?
 > 
 > No! The question I asked is: how can we canonical identify such a shared
 > library to guess the right package (or builtin.mk) from.
 > The example above is something how it _could_ look like, not like it looks.

You can't, because shared library versions vary by platform. That is,
the "same" version might be 20 on Linux and 23 on Solaris.

For including in a source distribution (that is, the kind of thing
that gets posted on CPAN) what you need is API informat, not ABI
information, and that means package names and versions rather than
binary shared library versions.

pkgconfig does more or less the right thing; what you want is a list
of pkgconfig requirements, not a list of shared library ABIs.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost