Re: [ANN] ldeb a Debian packager for Lua scripts

[Enrico Tassi <gares@...>]

On Tue, May 08, 2012 at 04:01:49PM +0200, steve donovan wrote:
> > This is a pretty standard technique in Debian to obtain smooth renames.
> > After weezy is released I can remove the dummy packages.
> 
> Then Squeeze becomes 'old stable'.  It would still be useful to keep
> the old names around longer, so weezies can still speak to squeezies,
> and Ubuntu-ites (at least until they sync with Debian)

The old names will die with weezy, i.e. will be available for ~2 more
years (estimated life of stable) plus something like 1 extra year as
old-stable. But will start to disappear from unstable after weezy is
released. In weezy we will have both the new and the old names.
Transition from old to new names has to happen within that release
lifetime, that is reasonable IMO.

> >  `pkg-config --libs lua5.1-lpeg`
> 
> Ah, now I finally understand what the -dev packages are for....

Well, you usually also get the doc with them. It is the package for the
developer, that is the use case I care about the most actually.

BTW this split is ubiquitous in Debian: the non -dev package is only the
runtime dependency (and it should be pulled in by a package with a
reasonable name, hence the weird names that embed the ABI/API number),
while the -dev is the compile time dependency (i.e. .h files, .pc, .a
for static linking, extra symlinks to help ld, and so on).  It is not
something I came up for lua, it is like that for all well packaged
shared libraries.

Ciao
-- 
Enrico Tassi