libutil in Debian

[Peter Wemm]

On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 10:23 AM, Tijl Coosemans <tijl at coosemans.org> wrote:
> On 2013-07-09 19:13, Warner Losh wrote:
>> On Jul 9, 2013, at 10:59 AM, Konstantin Belousov wrote:
>>> On Tue, Jul 09, 2013 at 05:05:00PM +0200, Robert Millan wrote:
>>>> 2013/7/9 Gleb Smirnoff <glebius at freebsd.org>:
>>>>> With all respect to GNU and Debian the libutil in BSD appeared in 1988,
>>>>> and the fact that GNU has taken that name in 1996 isn't reason for BSD
>>>>> to change name.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for pointing this out.
>>>>
>>>> Please note that my request is only based on practical grounds. It
>>>> shouldn't be interpreted as implying endorsement on Glibc's use of
>>>> libutil name.
>>>>
>>>> Historically, Glibc maintainer has been very difficult to deal with.
>>>> This has affected non-Linux ports of Glibc as well. In contrast,
>>>> FreeBSD community may or may not agree with proposals but is at least
>>>> open to discuss things. This (rather than "fairness") is the reason I
>>>> try to work things out here and not there.
>>>>
>>>> Please take it as a compliment rather than as offence :-)
>>>>
>>>>> Also, FreeBSD is just one of the BSD descendants, and all of them share
>>>>> the libutil.
>>>>
>>>> So, I take it that the change I'm proposing could have disruptive effects.
>>>>
>>>> I do think there are long-term advantages for FreeBSD and the other
>>>> BSD descendants in making it easy for their APIs to be deployed
>>>> elsewhere. I mean, in terms of portability.
>>>>
>>>> However I'm clearly biased so I'd rather not insist on this. I leave
>>>> it for you to judge.
>>>
>>> Renaming the libutil would break the ABI of the base system.
>>> If you are introducing new interfaces to the other systems, you
>>> can use a library name you find suitable.  But for the library
>>> which is linked with significant number of existing binaries,
>>> rename is not an easy option.
>>
>> Can we use libmap.conf to create an alias for the new name on FreeBSD
>> so that programs that link against libbsdutil, to pick an arbitrary
>> name, can work and libbsdutil can be packaged for debian? This will
>> allow things to be portable, while allowing repackaging by Debian.
>
> Or just a libbsdutil.so symlink?

ld uses lib*.so
ld-elf.so.1 uses the embedded DT_NEEDED that comes from the DT_SONAME
embedded in the *.so files.

Autoconf knows things like (a few random samples)
checking for openpty() in -lutil
checking for kvm_open in libutil
checking for login_getclass() in -lutil

While we could change the DT_SONAME, I don't see a way around "-lutil"
without a lot of pain on our end.
-- 
Peter Wemm - peter at wemm.org; peter at FreeBSD.org; peter at yahoo-inc.com; KI6FJV
UTF-8: So you can \342\200\231 .. for when a ' just won't do
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