On Fri, 24 Nov 2000, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote: > > having mulitiple versions of the same shared library causes trouble > when compiling in general. ld.so creates a symlink to the newest version, > from which the run-time-link version is determined at build-link time: > > libqt.so.1.45 > libqt.so.1 -> libqt.so.1.45 > libqt.so.2.2.2 > libqt.so.2.2 ->libqt.so.2.2.2 > libqt.so.2 -> libqt.so.2.2.2 > libqt.so -> libqt.so.2.2.2 -> big trouble, as a new build will link to > v2 explicitly and stop v1 apps from working
I don't see why this is big trouble. Unix and Linux have had full support for multiple libraries for years. I agree that newly compiled apps will link by default to the latest version of the library, but there is a compilation parameter (actually a linking parameter) to force them to use the old library if that is what is required. Also, old apps should have been compiled with the appropriate soname so that at run time they automatically use the correct version of the run library. So to summarize this, there is good support for multiple versions of libraries within Linux/Unix. I hope that most packagers are well aware of this support and use it properly, but if not there could conceivably be trouble until that packaging bug was fixed. Alan email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] phone: 250-727-2902 FAX: 250-721-7715 snail-mail: Dr. Alan W. Irwin Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria, P.O. Box 3055, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, V8W 3P6 __________________________ Linux-powered astrophysics __________________________
