kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Carsten Schoenert <c.schoenert@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I got a bug report [1] for KiCad in Debian testing/unstable because of a
not working ngspice based simulation in eeschema.

I was first searching for the reason why the packaging isn't detecting
that the assumed library libngspice.so.0.0.0 was detected as a dependency.
The bugreporter stated that he is needed the package libnsgpice0-dev to
get eeschema working with simulation. So I tried around this information
and the reporter is right. If I start eeschema without this package
installed I get an error message that libngspice.so was not found.

This is an error in my eyes because eeschema is not looking for the
needed library with the API version it's build against. As libngspice is
using a API version 0 the correct library to look for would be
libngspice.so.0 and not libngspice.so that is normally a symlink to the
most recent version of the library and only used while linking.
Thus we ship -dev packages in Debian with a symlink of a file libfoo.so
to full versioned named library. For libngspice0 this looks like this:

> $ ls -l /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libngspice.so*
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      19 Okt 15 19:50 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libngspice.so -> libngspice.so.0.0.0
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      19 Okt 15 19:50 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libngspice.so.0 -> libngspice.so.0.0.0
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7091024 Okt 15 19:50 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libngspice.so.0.0.0

> $ dpkg -S /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libngspice.so
> libngspice0-dev:amd64: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libngspice.so
$ dpkg -S /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libngspice.so.0.0.0
> libngspice0:amd64: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libngspice.so.0.0.0

So looking manually at the binaries build from the kicad source by ldd I
can see a lot linked libraries but no library libngspice.so.0! Seems the
library is simply opened by dlopen. So that's the reason why the
packaging isn't adding a dependency on the package libngspice0.

[1] https:/bugs.debian.org/911965

-- 
Regards
Carsten Schoenert