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https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=225406
--- Comment #7 from Richard W.M. Jones rjones@redhat.com 2009-02-20 12:25:41 EDT --- Created an attachment (id=332736) --> (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=332736) Proposed patch to e2fsprogs.spec
Here is a copy of an email I sent to Eric on this subject. - - - -
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.
[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/NamingGuidelines#Common_Character_Se...