Roy Hills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm having problems building nmap and xprobe from source because of > build-depends on libpcap-dev. I need to build these two packages from > source because I have local patches that I want to apply to the source > code before it's compiled.
You'd make me happier if you'd wrap your lines at a sensible length, like 75, instead of letting me do it... > I'm running sarge on i386 and have libpcap0.8-dev installed, which > allows both nmap and xprobe to build without error if I use > "dpkg-buildpackage -d" to override the dependency check. Do the programs also run without problems? [only libcap0.7-dev provides libcap-dev] > Is this a bug? If so, which package is in error - nmap for specifying > libpcap-dev, or libpcap-dev for not allowing libpcap0.8-dev to meet > the dependency? It depends... Usually all development packages of stable versions of a library Provide the generic name package, so the first guess is that libcap0.8 should provide libcap-dev. But it might not be so easy - maybe libcap0.8 isn't as stable as 0.7. If it was in testing, there could be other causes - e.g. currently there's libkpathsea3-dev and libkpathsea4-dev in sid, but only libkpathsea3-dev in testing, and only provides libkpathsea-dev. The purpose is that all packages that build-depend on libkpathsea-dev will be linked against the SOVERSION 3 and can migrate to testing without problems, while the 4 version is only used by one source package - the one that provides it. > I also note that the notes for libpcap-dev say that it is a "Empty > package to facilitate upgrades, can be safely removed", so I guess > this means that other packages shouldn't have depends against it. This might indicate that it was for an older upgrade (0.6-0.7), and there is no smooth upgrade path from 0.7 to 0.8 - maybe on purpose. In this case, it's either a bug in nmap and xprobe that they don't allow building against 0.8 - or the maintainer has found that there's an incompatibility. > Any pointers would be gratefully received. Did you have a look at the BTS pages for the involved packages? Regards, Frank -- Frank Küster Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich Debian Developer
