Comment 32 for bug 15051

several comments on the provided patch:

- as noted in bug #186187, pcre3 is not currently ready for merging from Debian with the present patch, due to binary incompatibilities in libpcrecpp0. Under the circumstances, the patch to move pcre3 to /lib should be broken out.

- the patch moves both libpcre and libpcreposix to /lib. Only libpcre is needed for grep; libpcreposix should be left in /usr/lib if there isn't a specific need to move it.

- the patch also moves the .a and .so files to /lib. These are development files that are not useful without /usr (in particular, /usr/include) and should not be moved. The custom is to create .so as a symlink in /usr/lib pointing to the library in /lib. There are some packages that do put their .so symlinks in /lib, but this is the exception rather than the rule; and the .a files don't belong there in any case.

- as binaries in /bin must have their libraries in /lib, so the grep package must end up with a versioned dependency on the version of libpcre3 that ships libpcre.so.3 in /lib. This should be done using the shlibs mechanism; either by incrementing the shlibs in pcre3, or using a debian/shlibs.local in the grep package. Normally I would hesitate to recommend bumping shlibs for the benefit of a single package, but in this case the shlibs already require a version of libpcre3 newer than what's shipped in gutsy, so it makes only a minimal difference for other packages.

Please provide a new patch for pcre3 that addresses these issues and, freeze allowing, I can sponsor this change.