libutil in Debian

[Peter Wemm]

On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 11:15 AM, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> On Jul 9, 2013, at 11:34 AM, Peter Wemm wrote:
[..]
>> While we could change the DT_SONAME, I don't see a way around "-lutil"
>> without a lot of pain on our end.
>
> We would continue to install libutil.*, so that solves all these problems. We'd just provide a compatibility thing that allows one to link with -lbsduitl also.

No, it'd have to be the other way around I think. We *need* -lutil to
work forever.  It was hard enough getting people to look in there in
the first place and now there's a ton of released tarballs with it
baked in.  It's been hard enough to get people to fix freebsd-1* vs
freebsd-1.* in autoconf.

The DT_SONAME would solve a runtime ld-elf.so.1 compatability problem
if glibc happens to name its libutil.so.N the same as ours.  However I
don't remember glibc using the same numbering conventions as us (they
seem to like major.minor.micro while we have major only.. if I recall
correctly) so even that shouldn't be an issue.

> I'm not sure that a symlink would actually work, but if it does, that's an easy way around the problem.

To be clear, *we* don't have a problem with the status quo.  The
change breaks a bunch of stuff and I'm not sure what we gain from it.

What does glibc put in its libutil? Is it meant to be a bsdish-libutil
compatability API? or something completely different?  How did this
even happen in the first place?  I'd like to understand what exactly
it is we're being asked to work around..

For example, if glibc ships a bsd-ish subset of libutil and we rename
ours to something other than libutil, then wouldn't that make us
incompatible with the convention we started and glibc picked up?

-- 
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