Generate shlibs files for .deb packages

[tomwhoiscontrary]

This request may we wildly off-beam, so feel free to shoot it down.

I have a cookery recipe to build a library. I am trying to do an old-school dpkg-buildpackage build of another library which depends on that library. The dpkg-buildpackage build fails because there is no dependency information for the first library. This is because the first library does not include a shlibs control file, without which dpkg cannot record the relevant information when it installs it.

There's some info about the whole sordid business here:

http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-sharedlibs.html#s8.6.4.3

is there a way to use fpm-cookery to generate a shlibs file when packaging a library? If not, could we have one?

[bernd]

It would be really nice to have this feature, yes. FPM already supports a shlibs option so writing the file to the package is not the problem. The hard part is to find a sane way to compute the file, scanning for dependencies etc.

I would like to do that, but I cannot promise when it's done. ;)