May be I misunderstood something, but the problem seems to be that
/etc/dpkg/shlibs.default doesn't contain some important libraries.
In my understanding, the file should contain a list of _all_ *installed*
shared libraries on the system and the packages names and versions that
provided the shared lib. So when you create a debpkg, the compiler
constructs the binary so that it works with this libs and so the
binary is dependent on the libraries, that were installed at this
time on the system. So it wouldn't be of much use if this file is
hardcoded in dpkg.deb or whatever else.
Instead of that I would suggest a mechanism like the installation and
removement of GNU Info files, for example. When a package is
installed, that postinst script should call a script like "register-shlib"
(or something like that) that adds an entry to /etc/dpkg/shlibs.default.
For example:
register-shlib libc 5 libc5
This is: register-shlib <shared-lib> <major rev> <package>
The postrm script should call a similar script to remove the entry. It
makes no sense having entries in /etc/dpkg/shlibs.default that aren't
installed on the system, nor does this make sense if the entries do not
represent the correct version numbers.
But what about minor shlib upgrades? The libc5 entry says:
libc 5 libc5 (>= 5.2.18)
Is libc always compatible to older versions? I think you need libc4
installed to run old a.out binaries! So the greater-equal (>=) refers to
the minor revision numbers, or am I wrong? This may be another problem.
If every shlib consists of the scheme "major.xxx.minor" (where xxx can
disappear) and is only compatible within a major number we could seperate
the major number and include it in the packages name, for example.
Comments are welcome,
Chris
-- _,, Christian Schwarz
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