Packaging Questions, New Debian Package, Packagers Guide

[Francois Gouget]

On Wed, 24 Nov 2004, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
>
> Marcus Meissner wrote:
>
>> Here is a list of the soft dependencies. We suggest packagers
>> install each and every last of those before building the package. These 
>> libraries are not dependencies in the RPM sense. In DEB packages, they 
>> should appear as "Suggests" or "Recommends", as the case may be.
>> 
> ICU
>   Adds support for BiDi to Wine. http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/. 
> Instructions for building (and testing) with BiDi are available at 
> http://winehq.org/?issue=218#How%20To%20Set%20Up%20BiDi%20Support

The problem with ICU is that, iirc, it introduces a dependency on 
libstdc++, and, afaik, libstdc++ binary compatiblity is broken quite 
often.

This is probably not an issue for the Debian packages which we can 
expect to be rebuilt whenever a libstdc++ becomes the Debian standard. 
But it's a problem if one wants to build a somewhat generic RPM package 
that can be installed on anything from RedHat 8 to Fedora Core 3, or on 
RedHat, Mandrake and SUSE.

So if the Package Maintainer's guide recommends building with ICU, it 
should also mention this issue.


-- 
Francois Gouget         fgouget at free.fr        http://fgouget.free.fr/
   Any sufficiently advanced Operating System is indistinguishable from Linux