Re: dh_makeshlibs -V and udebs

On Wed, 20 Dec 2017 at 20:50:27 +0100, Julien Cristau wrote:
> Removing -V would be very wrong. Either leave it as-is or make sure it's kept
> up to date with the highest version from .symbols.

Right, that's what I thought. The worst that can happen from using bare
-V (with no argument) is a slightly over-strict versioned dependency,
which is a lot better than a too-weak dependency; and .symbols files
mean library users usually don't pick up the over-strict dependency anyway,
so no harm is done.

Am I right in thinking that plain dh_shlibdeps (without -V) is only
acceptable for libraries that literally never add new ABI, which are
vanishingly rare?

> On December 20, 2017 8:35:18 PM GMT+01:00, Jeremy Bicha <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> 
>     We have several packages that pass the dh_makeshlibs -V flag. Simon
>     says he thinks it's not harmful since the symbols file takes
>     precedence. I think we should go ahead and remove it then

That doesn't follow: -V not being harmful is a reason why we should *not*
remove it.

For packages with no .symbols (C++ and udebs), -V generates strict
dependencies, which sometimes stall migrations but never lead to broken
systems. If a particular package's use of -V is sufficiently annoying,
then we can decide to invest the effort in using -V${abi_version} for
that package.

    smcv