[Fedora-packaging] are subpackages required for optional loadable libraries?

John Dennis jdennis at redhat.com
Wed Feb 27 01:23:22 UTC 2008


Historically when a package includes optional support via a loadable 
module we've put the loadable module in a subpackage. For example a 
package might include a module supporting mysql so we would create a 
mysql subpackage which contains the mysql loadable module and the 
subpackage would require mysql. I presume the reason we've historically 
created these little subpackages is to deal with dependency issues.

But suppose your package includes dozens of optional loadable modules 
does it still make sense to create dozens of subpackages? It starts to 
get unwieldly really quick. Is it permissible to skip all the 
subpackages, have the rpm include all the loadable modules, and put the 
onus on the user such that if they edit the main package's config file 
to load the mysql module it's up to them to make sure the mysql 
libraries are installed?

Here's another issue: Suppose the package puts it's loadable modules 
(e.g. .so's) in it's own subdirectory for loadable modules. RPM's 
automatic dependency checking seems to completely miss all the external 
libraries needed at run time to load one of the modules and resolve all 
it's references. The net result is none of these external dependencies 
get picked up at all. Is that O.K.? How does one deal with that in a 
spec file? The answer to this question probably drives the answer to the 
first question.

FWIW, the upstream spec file does not create a subpackage per loadable 
module. It does create a subpackage containing all the loadable modules. 
When we build the loadable module subpackage the resulting rpm is 
missing a lot of the external dependencies on external .so's. That's 
unfortunate but I'm thinking it's the only practical way to deal with 
it. Trying to factor out all the dependencies will be a packaging 
nightmare and it's going to be a headache for users trying to install, 
they're going to have to deal with lots of subpackages. At least with 
the scheme where all the loadable modules are in one subpackage you 
won't pull in stuff you don't want or need, but at the expense of not 
pulling in something you might need. Comments?
-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>




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