* Wichert Akkerman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [010426 11:18]:
> Previously Daniel Kobras wrote:
> > For now I added a lintian overrides for this, but Sean asked me to bring up
> > discussion here to clarify what lintian should treat as shared lib in the
> > future in order to properly solve this issue.
> 
> Geez, again? Basically a .so files that is not in /lib, /usr/lib,
> /usr/X11R6/lib or another directory listed in /etc/ld.so.conf is not
> a library (the dynamic linker can't find it anyway then) .

Wichert, I think "Geez, again?" is the incorrect response to Daniel's
mail. Bugs #42399 and #65345 against debian-policy have been outstanding
for 1 year and 268 days and 322 days. #65345 even has a patch against
lintian, though it is likely far too old to automatically apply.

Sean forwarded the bugs from lintian to debian-policy 8 months after the
patch was submitted. Sadly, Sean did not give comments why he did so;
however, I hope Sean will forgive me when I suggest he did so because he
likely wants an amendement to policy to document the correct handling of
.so files outside of the standard (and configured) paths before he
changes lintian. (If he were to change it now, afaict, lintian would not
be truly policy compliant.)

In that vein, I have taken a stab at a policy diff. I have made the diff
against the .txt version -- hopefully no one will be upset at me. Since
I am not a Debian developer, I do not know if I can submit a policy
proposal. If that is the case, and there are no obvious flaws in this
patch, I would hope someone would kindly resubmit the proposal in their
own name, so this bug could be fixed finally. :) To make things easy for
anyone, lets just explicitly place this text in the public domain, so
that it can be included in debian-policy without those hideous copyright
issues.


--- policy.txt  Thu Apr 26 13:56:29 2001
+++ so-policy.txt       Thu Apr 26 14:04:10 2001
@@ -2313,6 +2313,13 @@
      library links point to them, just before `dpkg' continues the
      installation and removes the links!
 
+     It is the case that some packages supply plugins intended for
+     internal use only and these plugins are often shared libraries. If
+     the plugin files are not installed in the default search path of
+     `ld.so' (/lib, /usr/lib), or in common locations specified in
+     `/etc/ld.so.conf' (such as /usr/X11R6/lib), then the package is not
+     required to comply with the paragraph requiring symbolic links.
+
 
 9.1. The `shlibs' File Format
 -----------------------------

-- 
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--- policy.txt  Thu Apr 26 13:56:29 2001
+++ so-policy.txt       Thu Apr 26 14:04:10 2001
@@ -2313,6 +2313,13 @@
      library links point to them, just before `dpkg' continues the
      installation and removes the links!
 
+     It is the case that some packages supply plugins intended for
+     internal use only and these plugins often have an extension .so. If
+     the plugin files are not installed in the default search path of
+     `ld.so' (/lib, /usr/lib), or in common locations specified in
+     `/etc/ld.so.conf' (such as /usr/X11R6/lib), then the package is not
+     required to comply with the paragraph requiring symbolic links.
+
 
 9.1. The `shlibs' File Format
 -----------------------------

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