[Ffmpeg-devel] [RFC] dlopen vs linking for external libraries

[Uoti Urpala]

On Tue, 2007-02-13 at 15:12 +0100, Luca Barbato wrote:
> I don't know the other distribution or the other people, usually you
> check the configure script and the readme to write the deplist, not just
> random usage of ldd...

The default for Debian is to generate (binary) shared library
dependencies based on what the binaries actually link to. If you're only
familiar with source package build dependencies from Gentoo then those
are created by hand.

Generating the dependencies automatically allows updating "libfoo-devel"
packages as long as the API stays backwards-compatible even if the ABI
changes. When you rebuild the application source package with the
updated libfoo-devel the resulting binary package will automatically
depend on the correct library version; hardcoded library dependencies
would fail.