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DISCLAIMER: This is just a question of better understanding. I was not affected by this issue myself, and I don't have any intention to discuss AUR vs. official packages, user stupidity or things like that. I am purely interested in understanding the technical packaging decisions involved in order to get a better understanding of Arch packaging.
Recently there was this little issue with the freetype2 package conflicting with other AUR packages, that also provide freetype2, e.g. freetype2-infinality (see discussion at [1]).
Now those alternative freetype2 packages normally set a provides=("freetype2=$pkgver") and everything is fine. In this case however the PKGBUILD for freetype2 was changed to also provide "libfreetype.so" [2] and other packages (namely libbluray [3]) instead of depending on "freetype2" now depend on "libfreetype.so".
Here is the question: What is the rationale to depend on a library name instead of the package containing this library?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comm … _conflict/
[2] https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/pack … c7c442bc38
[3] https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/pack … 589b15b0d5
Last edited by phw (2016-05-13 08:18:13)
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Found something, there is an answer at https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 9#p1626089 :
Mika79 wrote:Is there a reason that now instead of a package a shared object file name is in the dependencies?
It prevents people from breaking their system by doing partial upgrades when there is a soname bump.
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