Yet another wish list

[Michael Schwendt]

On Thu, 22 Jan 2004 15:21:26 +0100, Leonard den Ottolander wrote:

> The mhash rpm by Michael Schwendt available at fedora US
> (http://www.fedora.us/pkglists/1/stable/mhash-0.8.18-0.fdr.1.1.src.rpm.html) could be used instead, but I would suggest two changes. It lacks libmhash.la, which iiac is needed for dynamic linking.
>

libmhash.la is a libtool [meta] archive and is only used by GNU libtool or
GNU ltdl, albeit not required. Applications which dlopen a library better
open libmhash.so.2. Libtool archives are known to cause problems due to
hardcoded inter-library dependencies (I've run into several problems
myself). For linking shared objects you don't need them.

Nevertheless, whether and when to include .la files in a package has been
discussed many times before (see e.g. fedora-devel at fedora.us list
archives) and should be covered by a future policy for the Fedora Project,
so components like KDE don't suffer from missing .la files. Red Hat seem
to decide on a case by case basis whether to drop or include .la files.
A somewhat unfortunate situation.

> Also I would suggest to use the name libmhash instead of mhash, and reserve the name mhash for a package containing a command line tool, in analogy to libmcrypt and mcrypt.
>

mhash provides the name libmhash and is closer to upstream naming.  Also,
according to rpm search engines, many more distributors call the package
mhash instead of libmhash. The software is called "mhash", and IMHO it is
a bad habit to add a "lib" prefix to indicate it's a library. Packages
should not be categorized via their package name. This doesn't add any
value.

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