[REPOST!] Split out e2fsprogs sublibraries

Richard W.M. Jones rjones at redhat.com
Tue May 12 12:52:04 UTC 2009


[I posted this before, but no one replied, so sending again to
fedora-devel-list]

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=225406#c7

I would like to propose that e2fsprogs generate four subpackages for
the independent libraries that it contains.  These four libraries are
used by other packages that don't need the whole of e2fsprogs-devel
(eg. krb5_workstation uses libss, qpid uses libuuid, and many programs
use libcom_err).

Our specific use case is to help with ongoing work porting libraries
to MinGW (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW) where we would prefer
to package mingw32-libuuid for mingw32-qpidc without needing to port
the whole of e2fsprogs.

I looked at Debian's package, and would like to propose a split along
the same lines:

  http://packages.debian.org/source/lenny/e2fsprogs

Despite the apparent complexity, there are only really four
subpackages.  For the Fedora package we would create:

  libblkid      libblkid-devel
  libcom_err    libcom_err-devel       [note 1]
  libss         libss-devel
  libuuid       libuuid-devel

There are no conflicting package names in Fedora at the moment, except
for the similarly named libss7 (a library implementing Signalling
System 7 telephone switching protocol).

I have attached a patch against Rawhide which does the above split.  I
set up the dependencies so there should be no loss of functionality
for users who install just e2fsprogs or e2fsprogs-devel.

What remains is to advertize the split on fedora-devel-list and
encourage package maintainers to replace:

  BuildRequires: e2fsprogs-devel

with

  BuildRequires: lib<uuid|ss|blkid|com_err>-devel

where appropriate.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
New in Fedora 11: Fedora Windows cross-compiler. Compile Windows
programs, test, and build Windows installers. Over 70 libraries supprt'd
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW http://www.annexia.org/fedora_mingw




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