Major number in library package names

[Michael A. Peters]

The problem is dependency hell caused by people who put Requires in
their spec files that assume packagers are going to do things a certain
way. Sometimes the major version of a library will be different than the
package version, particularly if the shared library is just a component
of the package.

That can be solved with a provides though - as in
For example if Foobar 4.8 contains foolib.so.3.5 you could put:

Provides: foolib = 3.5

and that will help satisfy dependencies for other rpms that assume the
library will be spit as a sub package from the main package.

However, imho a better solution is to let rpm do what it was coded to do
- figure out shared library provides and dependencies with the
AutoReqProv functions it has. That's imho much better

On Thu, 2004-07-15 at 19:24, Toshio wrote:
> I ran rpmlint on the qof library package I just made and had it tell me:
> 
> qof-0.5.0:
>   E: qof incoherent-version-in-name 0.5.0
>   The package name should contain the major version of the library.
> 
> qof-devel-0.5.0:
>   W: qof-devel no-major-in-name qof-devel
>   The major number of the library isn't contained in the package name.
> 
> What do people think?  Is it good practice to include the major number
> in the name of the package (qof0-0.5.0 similar to gtkhtml3 and db4) or
> is this just rpmlint being overzealous?
> 
> -Toshio
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