[Fedora-packaging] review cgilib issues

[Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski]

On Monday, 16 February 2009 at 20:57, Lucian Langa wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm currently reviewing cgilib package (#450050).
> The same functionality is provided by a similar package already in
> fedora libcgi.
> I would initially suggest using Conflicts for cgilib as those two
> package will most obviously conflict.
> Mamoru was kind enough to detail this issues a little further:
> 
> * For these packages both packages the library named "libcgi.so.1",
>   which is really a problem.
>   - In this case a simple conflict method (like "Conflicts: libcgi"
>     on cgilib") won't work as you desire, where there are some packages
>     which Requires libcgi.so.1, because
>     - An admin tries to install the package by "yum install foo"
>       (where foo has the dependency for libcgi.so.1)
>     - yum tries to resolve the dependency on foo, then finds that
>       two packages have "Provides: libcgi.so.1".
>     - Then yum will install either of libcgi or cgilib according to
>       yum's implementation, i.e. we cannot expect which will actually
>       be installed. However foo requires one of them, and perhaps
>       foo won't work with the other one.
>     - Here "Conflicts" does not work, because yum will try to
>       install one of them, not both.
> 
> * Another problem is that the soname major version "1" on libcgi.so."1"
>   in libcgi (in Fedora) was, actually, arbitrarily chosen by
>   Fedora maintainer, not by the upstream. And unfortunately
>   this decision now conflicts with cgilib.
>   - You can check this from libcgi srpm, especially 
>     libcgi-1.0-Makefile.in.patch in libcgi.srpm. The original upstream
>     tarball only creates libcgi.so with no soname, however the Fedora
>     maintainer seems to have created a patch to add the proper
>     soname to libcgi.so. Then the soname "libcgi.so.1" seems to have
>     chosen.
>     Actually on Debian (as far as I checked debian's libcgi)
>     the soname is libcgi.so."0" (and here .0 was arbitrarily chosen
>     by Debian's maintainer).
> 
> Any thoughts on this ?

I think we cannot have two packages both providing a library with the
same filename and soname while being incompatible (as in: not a drop-in
replacement). One of them must be renamed.

Unrelated to this, libcgi maintainer should not have chosen to use
libcgi.so.1 as the soname without upstream's approval.

Regards,
R.

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