Subject: Re: [vlc] Unable to build the vlc package as it requires libsystemd-dev

From: Mark Hindley <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2020 13:59:58 +0100

On Thu, Apr 30, 2020 at 03:41:08PM +0300, Andrey ``Bass'' Shcheglov wrote:
> Mark,
> 
> thank you for your response.
> 
> Yes, documenting build instructions wherever those are different from
> Debian's would be great!
> 
> Still, could you comment on how (in)compatible libsystemd-dev and
> libelogind-dev are?

They are reasonably compatible from a compilation perspective. That is by
design.  However, Debian only compiles against libsystemd-dev and it is not
known whether all packages would compile against libelogind-dev without some
sort of patching in of explicit support. Certainly patching was required for
policykit-1, although those changes have now been accepted upstream.

> Looking at the content of the binary packages, both contain almost the
> same set of headers.
> Is there any chance one will "virtually" provide the other?

That is currently the case for libsystemd0/libelogind0 only at runtime. Doing
libelogind-dev provides libsystemd-dev concerns me as I think we might introduce
FTBFS until we know that all source packages will build with either. Given the
number of source packages in Debian, that is a lot of testing. Hence why we
currently follow Debian and only build against libsystemd-dev.

Does that make sense?

Mark