On 11 February 2013 23:23, Greg Troxel <g...@ir.bbn.com> wrote: > (First, "all mainstream distros" is only talking about Linux.) > > This .so=>devel does not make sense to me. I thought the point was > that -devel split things that people who wanted to compile against the > package needed, but not things needed to run. So if a .so is used by a > program that has been compiled, then it needs to be in the non-devel > package. I would expect that .so generally belongs in the non-devel > package, and that the -devel package would have .a and .h. > > FWIW, BSD packaging systems do not have this -devel notion
[Assuming a Debian-centric view.] To be clear, the “.so” files shipped in -dev packages are just symlinks. The real “.so.X.Y” are shipped in the corresponding library package, as makes sense. Nala Ginrut wrote earlier: > This could be a real issue since almost all mainstream distros packaging > policy force *.so be put in -devel packages. Though openSUSE/debian adds > the exception for Guile, I believe it's so hard to do that for every > packages uses Guile. What do you mean, “adds the exception for Guile”? The guile-2.0-dev package contains the same /symlink/ as other -dev packages do. The real .so is in guile-2.0-libs. I do not see how that is different to any other library/dev package pair.