surely an ordinary package shouldn't depend on devel packages?

[Brian Morrison]

Michael Schwendt wrote:
>> I'd wager that xine has libxine statically linked and/or compiled in.
> 
> No, libxine.so is just a symlink pointing to the real and versioned
> library file in the xine-lib package. This symlink is needed only when
> building software -- it's the link that makes the -lxine linker
> command work.

Yes, Redhat and Fedora have always done this.

The executables look for <library>.so.<version> and that is a symlink to
<library>.so.<full-version> in one of the ld.so.conf paths.

-- 

Brian