Re: Strange rpm check-files behaviour

[Tim Mooney <mooney dogbert cc ndsu NoDak edu>]

In regard to: Strange rpm check-files behaviour, Jos Vos said (at 8:43pm on...:

>Hi,
>
>After detecting that "subversion-devel" (RHL 9) does not include
>the .so files (like /usr/lib/libapr-0.so), that another application
>I want to generate seems to need, and I also didn't see a match in
>the %files sections, I did a "rpmbuild -bi subversion.spec".
>
>To my surprise, the .so files *are* installed in the buildroot,
>and /usr/lib/rpm/check-files does not complain that they are
>not packaged.
>
>Can anybody explain this?

Do an

	rpm -qa | egrep '-devel'

on your system, then choose a few of them at random and do

	rpm -q -l <whatever>-devel

and see if there are any shared objects (shared libraries) in them.  Most
won't have any.

Why?  Because shared libraries are necessary to as part of the minimum
runtime for the package, so they need to be included in the main
package itself (or perhaps a <whatever>-runtime subpackage, that all the
other packages will likely require) for the package to work.  If they were
part of the -devel package, then the main package would depend on the
devel package, and at that point there's little reason to have -devel as
a separate package.

The -devel package generally only includes static libraries and header
files, and maybe some other support stuff (api documentation, autoconf
macros, or whatever).

Tim
-- 
Tim Mooney                              mooney@dogbert.cc.ndsu.NoDak.edu
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