Following up from the upstream release of a new procps, the Debian packages have also been updated. This upload has a significant change in that, I hope, procps is now multi-arch compliant. To make this happen, the libprocps library is now in it’s own package, separate from the binaries. It also means that if you have programs not from procps that link to this library they are now broken. I put in a Breaks: line for the three I know about (xmem, guymager and open-vm-tools) which will need a recompile with a small tweak in the control file and linked statements.
As suggested in the multi arch implementation wiki page, I tested the libprocps0-dev package by compiling something against it, in this case another Debian package xmem. Doing this was very useful for teasing out some bugs on the dev package itself that did not appear while linking the library to the procps binaries.
In short, the new procps has a lot fewer patches than the old ones and the next version will have less as I have already included the current changes into the upstream git repository. The main differences are now
- freebsd linux version is read from a file not from uts
- includes use __restrict not the auto make defined restrict which may not be present in third party packages
- libnucrsesw conditionally linked with watch for 8bit watch
The three are really bugs, especially the last, which is why the patches will disappear next release.
