Dear Maintainer,

Policy 8.5 recommends ("should") for a -dev package to have an install
dependency on the respective runtime library. It seems lintian does not
check for this but I think it should.

Hopefully, implementation would not that difficult: In debian/control,
identify <slug>-dev packages, in the libdevel section, and if there's a
related <slug><soname> package in the lib section, the -dev package
should have a strict versioned dependency on the runtime library. The
latter is actually already covered by "weak-library-dev-dependency".

Regards,

    Christoph

tags 880922 + moreinfo
thanks

Hi Christoph,

Thanks for the report. I was wondering if you could quickly provide
some example "bad" and "good" dependencies. This would 100% confirm
my understanding of what you are after, as well as be useful as
testcases within Lintian.

A very quick draft for a tag description (which I am happy to rework
later) would also be highly appreciated. :)


Best wishes,

The part where this actually matters most, and that should be easy to
check, is that in most cases libslug.so is a dangling symlink without
the dependency.

The linker then silently attempts to link with libslug.a,
which gets you either unwanted and unnoticed static linking
or weird-looking build errors.

#1118959 would be an example where the former happened in trixie and in
forky[1] the latter happened.

cu
Adrian

[1] https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=libopaque&arch=amd64&ver=1.0.1-3&stamp=1761405734&raw=0