Re: [Gábor Gombás] Bug#564566: libkadm5clnt7: SONAME conflict with Heimdal

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

--On Sunday, January 10, 2010 09:40:10 PM -0800 Russ Allbery 
<rra at stanford.edu> wrote:

> Greg Hudson <ghudson at mit.edu> writes:
>
>> (I'd also like to understand better why Debian needs to have both sets
>> of libraries installed, but I have more pressing matters to investigate
>> at this moment.)
>
> It's very useful to be able to mix and match the libraries, particularly
> when you're developing software and trying to ensure that it works with
> all the major Kerberos implementations.  It primarily applies to the basic
> libraries, of course, but increasingly I want to be able to have both,
> say, Authen::Krb5::Admin and Heimdal::Kadm5 installed at the same time so
> that I can easily run test suites for software like wallet that will be
> built on both.

Perhaps more importantly, while these libraries have similar names, they 
don't have identical ABI's, and they don't speak even remotely the same 
protocol.  If one needs to be able to perform administrative operations on 
both Heimdal and MIT KDC's, one needs both libraries.

I would note that there's no reason a library libkadm5clnt.so can't have an 
soname like libkadm5clnt.so.7_mit or some such (and similarly for Heimdal). 
For various reasons I have one named libkadm5clnt.so.4_opensc2 and it works 
just fine.

-- Jeff