libutil in Debian

[Warner Losh]

On Jul 9, 2013, at 1:10 PM, Peter Wemm wrote:

> 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 proposing we change what we're doing today, apart from adding a new name.

>> 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?

I'm not proposing a rename as a way to address this.

Warner

> -- 
> 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