[Fedora-packaging] Request for Guideline Clarification

[Rich Mattes]

Hi all,

I've been gathering bits and pieces of information regarding the 
packaging of shared libraries for a while now.  As I understand it:

- Normal .so libraries with versioned filenames go into the base package 
for a program when they exist

- Unversioned .so libraries go into the -devel package
   -- If there are no versioned libraries for a program, should a 
versioned library be added or should the unversioned .so file be 
included in the base package?

- Libraries which are used by other programs at runtime should be 
versioned, and in %{_libdir}
   -- Are there exceptions to this?  When is it appropriate to leverage 
subdirectories and /etc/ld.so.conf.d/?

- Libraries which are plugins to one specific program, and are dlopened 
by that program, do not need a versioned filename.  They should go in 
their own subdierctory in %{_libdir} (e.g. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10)
   -- If packaged as seperate plugins, they should be in packages called 
packagename-plugins-pluginname, or something similar

- All shared library filenames should begin with lib

A lot of this isn't in the packaging guidelines, I think if these points 
could be clarified and included in the guidelines it would help to 
answer a lot of questions.

Thanks,

Rich