[lxc-devel] Debian packaging and the liblxc library

[Daniel Lezcano]

Guido Trotter wrote:
> Hi,
>
> While trying to package LXC for Debian I noticed that lxc has a
> library, with SONAME 0.6.0 (for the current stable release).
> This is not very packageable: if I provide a public library in Debian
> the API/ABI should be "kind of stabilized" and there should be a
> SONAME bump at every ABI breakage, plus I need to change the -dev
> package name when the API breaks.
> So my question is: what's the status of liblxc? Is it a
> "kind-of-stable" library to be used externally or, at least for now,
> an internal library for the lxc userspace utilities?
>   
Excellent question.
The liblxc is under development and the API is still moving searching 
for the frontier between the library functionalities and the command lines.
To answer your question, the status of the library is : "at least for 
now, an internal library for the lxc userspace utilities."
In the future, the liblxc will be a container development library and 
the command lines will rely on it, but before freezing the library api, 
I was expecting feedbacks from people to look for if something is wrong 
with the library API.

I am working on a parallel project which should provide the 
checkpoint/resart for lxc, and I feel the liblxc API has to change a litle.

I was planning to freeze the library API with a lxc-1.0.0 version.
> In the second case maybe it's better to change things so that it's
> installed in /usr/lib/lxc/... rather than /usr/lib, and not to provide
> liblxc[-dev] as packages at all, until the API/ABI is stable enough.
>   
Yes, that makes sense.

> In the first case it would probably be nice to stabilize the SONAME to
> something like "1" and not bump it up with every version.  What do you
> think?
>