libxen-4.9: missing libxenstat

Hi,

libxen-4.9 is used at runtime, and contains the dynamic library. libxen-dev is used for development and contains the header files (*.h), the dynamic library .so link, and the static library. That's how it is supposed to be. Just adding /usr/includexenstat.h to libxen-4.9 wouldn't work, as other header files are also likely needed, and the dynamic library .so link is also needed. The static library might not, depending on your compile options, but it goes together with the dev package per policy. See https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-sharedlibs.html#static-libraries for the details.

I'm going to close this bug as invalid, but if I misunderstood your point, please feel free to reopen it and clarify.

Thanks!

No, neither libxen-4.9 nor libxen-dev contains it. To confirm, just do a
dpkg -L libxen-dev libxen-4.9 |grep xenstat

One should see a libxenstat.so, but unfortunately this is not the case ...

$ dpkg -L xen-utils-4.9 | grep xenstat
/usr/lib/xen-4.9/lib/libxenstat.so

xen-utils-4.9 pulls in other packages with it:

$ sudo apt-get install xen-utils-4.9
...
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  bridge-utils grub-common grub-xen-bin grub-xen-host os-prober xen-hypervisor-4.9-amd64 xen-utils-4.9 xen-utils-common xenstore-utils

So as I understand it, your concern here is not that the .so is entirely unavailable, but rather that it requires installing a few extra packages just to get it. I suppose one solution would be to split xenstat itself out of the xen-utils-4.9 package into its own package, however that seems pretty invasive, and wouldn't be practical to maintain in Ubuntu - if you really want this, I'd advise raising it with Debian's xen packaging team by filing a bug there. For that reason, I am doubtful this change would be considered for Ubuntu, but will leave this report open as Wishlist for now. If/when you contact Debian about it, feel free to update this bug report.

Basically yes. When I do a 'dpkg -L libxen-dev|grep xenstat' I get:

/usr/include/xenstat.h
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkgconfig/xenstat.pc

When doing a 'grep xenstat /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkgconfig/xenstat.pc' one gets
Libs: -L${libdir} -lxenstat

Unfortunately, when I do 'dpkg -L libxen-dev' I see a lot of xenlibs, but neither libxenstat.so nor libxenstat.a.

So IMHO it is a bug. Either libxen-dev should provide those libs (what a developer would expect), or it should at least pull in the required lib via dep declaration to xen-utils-*. IMHO the latter would be not a good decision, because one does not need all the bloat from the xen-utils-* package incl. all the packages from its dep tree in turn (and because there is no *.a, it would have this negative effect on the package being built as well).