[Elftoolchain-developers] filename conflicts with RedHat/mr511.de libelf

[Y G. A. N. <gir...@ap...>]

Hi,

One of the problems I have with packaging libelf for Debian is that the
installed files would conflict with those in the libelfg0[-dev] and the
libelf[1|-dev] packages already in Debian.  These are built from libelf
(from mr511.de) and elfutils (from RedHat) respectively.

1. I will have to change the 'source' package names to not conflict with
these (I choose libbsdelf: http://bugs.debian.org/473188 but that can be
changed if we wish to, so suggestions are welcome).  If libelf and the
rest of the ELF toolchain will always be distributed as a single unit, I
can use elftoolchain as the source package name.

2. To handle the conflict of files, we could declare a "Conflict" of
installation of these packages with those that we build.  However this
means that software that is linked to these existing packages cannot
co-exist with our installed libraries.  This includes the following:

elfutils - collection of utilities to handle ELF objects
bug-buddy- GNOME Desktop Environment bug reporting tool
ltrace - Tracks runtime library calls in dynamically linked programs
prelink - ELF prelinking utility to speed up dynamic linking
scsh-0.6 - A `scheme' interpreter designed for writing system programs
mpatrol(c2) - A library for debugging memory allocations

libelf1 and libelfg0 (the shared library packages) are able to coexist
right now because they ship /usr/lib/libelf.so.1 and
/usr/lib/libelf.so.0 but they are certain to conflict when libelfg0 gets
a SONAME bump.

libelf-dev and libelfg0-dev already declare a Conflict on each other and
there is no way out (they install files with conflicting names in the
same area).

So this business is messy.  Koshy, is it OK if I continue with this and
declare "Conflict" between the packages?  How do FreeBSD and NetBSD
handle this?

Cheers,

Giridhar

-- 
Y Giridhar Appaji Nag | http://appaji.net/