Christopher X. Candreva said: > On Thu, 27 Oct 2005, Dennis Peterson wrote: > >> JamesDR said: > >> system runbook (everyone has runbooks, right?). It is very important >> that >> upgrades be done on a clean system and that the running processes be >> stopped before beginning the upgrade. My practice is to keep the >> freshclam >> and clamd conf files in an RCS directory so that they can be reused or >> referenced. > > I really have to ask why ? My standard procedure is to make install, > kill clamd, run clamd. When I remember I kill off the old numbered .so > files, otherwise they take up some disk space and don't bother anyone. > > Clam seems to be the only program I ever hear about these library problems > with. Maybe it's a compile option problem, maytbe it's that I'm on > Solaris, > but I've never had to clear out the old libraries. > > Unix handles this by giving each .so a version number, and symlinking the > unnumbered .so to the latest version. Programs can link against .so for > any > version, or against a specific version number. Really, I can see no way an > old version numbered library can effect things unless something is very > wrong with the build environment -- either it links against the old > version > number instead of the one just built, or the symlink doesn't get updated. > > -Chris
Unix doesn't do any of that for you. The compiler/linker and make files do all the work and when it doesn't work quite right or fails in the middle of a build or you have a crash, who knows what, there is the possibility of debris being left behind that can cause trouble. I consider all obsolete libraries to be debris and get rid of them. They have no value and I don't need to waste tape space backing them up. Moreover, folks who are sloppy about not cleaning up libraries tend also to be sloppy about managing the executables, too, and how many posts have you seen on this list from people who have failed to properly tidy things up? How about too damn many. But if you wish to trust your systems to survive accumulating libraries, by all means do. I don't think its a line item on anyones best practices page, though. dp _______________________________________________ http://lurker.clamav.net/list/clamav-users.html
