Discussion about bug #615504

[Leandro de Oliveira]

Bluecove is a java library and is platform-independent. It uses bluez in linux.
But the instalation of bluez on ubuntu doesn't provide a versionless
symlink that is necessary for bluecove to work without user
intervention. Bluecove links against a versionless library to be able
to use the same build with bluez version 3 and version 4.

I thought not having a versionless symlink was a bug, but it seems to
be an explicit decision, if that is the case, then java apps using
bluetooth will always need the user to install libbluetooth-dev
instead of being able to work with the latest version. Since backwards
compatibility should be a given, I don't see why there coudn't be a
versionless symlink.

2010/8/17 Martin Pitt <martin.pitt at ubuntu.com>:
> Hello Leandro,
>
> Leandro de Oliveira [2010-08-16 15:29 -0300]:
>> The main issue is that a symlink named libbluetooth.so is required for
>> bluecove to work without user intervention.
>
> This sounds like a build system bug of bluecove. Library packages
> must not install a versionless libfoo.so symlink. This is allowed for
> -dev packages, since they do not have to be installable in several
> versions in parallel, but that must be the case for the actual
> libraries. Also, linking against a versionless library would be very
> crash prone, since you cannot rely on the library's ABI.
>
> bluecove isn't packaged, it seems to be a third-party app?
>
> Martin
> --
> Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
> Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)
>