Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
Eric,
I would like to propose that e2fsprogs generate four subpackages for
the independent libraries that it contains. These four libraries are
used by other packages that don't need the whole of e2fsprogs-devel
(eg. krb5_workstation uses libss, qpid uses libuuid, and many programs
use libcom_err).
Our specific use case is to help with ongoing work porting libraries
to MinGW (
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW) where we would prefer
to package mingw32-libuuid for mingw32-qpidc without needing to port
the whole of e2fsprogs.
I looked at Debian's package, and would like to propose a split along
the same lines:
http://packages.debian.org/source/lenny/e2fsprogs
Despite the apparent complexity, there are only really four
subpackages. For the Fedora package we would create:
libblkid libblkid-devel
libcom_err libcom_err-devel [note 1]
libss libss-devel
libuuid libuuid-devel
There are no conflicting package names in Fedora at the moment, except
for the similarly named libss7 (a library implementing Signalling
System 7 telephone switching protocol).
I have attached a patch against Rawhide which does the above split. I
set up the dependencies so there should be no loss of functionality
for users who install just e2fsprogs or e2fsprogs-devel.
What remains is to advertize the split on fedora-devel-list and
encourage package maintainers to replace:
BuildRequires: e2fsprogs-devel
with
BuildRequires: lib<uuid|ss|blkid|com_err>-devel
where appropriate.
Please let me know what you think.
Thanks, this has been on a back-burner for me for a while; I've been
meaning to do it but it just hasn't risen in priority. Having a place
to start will help. :)
There's a bug open already, too:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=225406
Bug 225406 - split out libcom_err and libuuid?
One potential wrinkle is that util-linux may be assimilating libblkid,
at least, in the future - but I suppose that if anything this may
facilitate that transition.
I'll look over this and let you know. I like it in general, e2fsprogs
has turned into a bit of a ... junk-box of useful libraries. :)
-Eric