dpkg-shlibdeps doesn't work correctly for many package builds

[Tim Spriggs]

At the end of package builds dpkg-shlibdeps determines what libraries are required for a package via ld relationships. These relationships are not being discovered correctly as seen in several bug reports and becomes apparent when installing/testing binaries.

This is a critical component of package building for a sane/usable repository and needs to be fixed before NCP2 can be released.

[Tim Spriggs (tim-tajinc)]

multiple occurrences of this problem have been reported officially and unofficially (via IRC/email conversations)

[Tim Spriggs (tim-tajinc)]

The scope of the problem is beyond dpkg-shlibdeps. Generally the correct fix for this problem is within each packages build environment. Taking ruby1.8 as an example (see bug #263002) the fix was a patch to the configure.in file to specify the exact name of the library produced. If the configure stage specifies a different name for linux and solaris then the shlibdeps hints are not correct for the build.

There are possible hackish solutions but none of them feel right. The correct fix is within the sources that exhibit problems with automatic dependencies.