Re: library problems w/ RH5.1

[Marc Ewing <marc redhat com>]

Steve Dunham <dunham@cse.msu.edu> writes:
> Marc Ewing <marc@redhat.com> writes:
> 
> > Sounds like you didn't apply the updates for 5.1 from the errata.
> 
> Still, when I last checked gnome (particularly on Red Hat) has a lot
> of shared library problems.  They can be divided into two categories:
> 
>  * No interlibrary dependencies: Libraries should be linked against
>    shared libraries that they reference.  This prevents people from
>    accidentally mixing libraries at link time.  The reason that gnome
>    has this problem on Red Hat is that libtool is broken (and not
>    likely to be fixed in the future).  Debian has a hack to libtool in
>    place to turn to interlibrary dependencies back on, but it seems
>    that nobody is both willing and capable of fixing libtool
>    correctly. (The upstream author hasn't figured out a satisfactory
>    solution and doesn't have time to work on it right now.)

We are aware of this issue.  We more than likely will be hacking
libtool to provide dependencies as well.

>  * Library APIs change without the soname changing.  Obviously, we can't
>    expect development versions to keep changing their soname, but no
>    two release versions of libraries that are not binary compatible
>    should have the same soname.  Aside from libjpeg, I haven't
           ^ "not"
>    personally verified any problems of this type, but I heard there
>    were some recent problems with imlib.

We are also aware of this problem.  This one is harder because it
involves us trying educate the authors about sonames (it doesn't
do us any good to unilaterly "fix" authors' sonames).  The jpeg
one caught us by surprise (the authors never used sonames properly
before) so we released updates.  Outside of libjpeg, I think you'll
find that this is a GNOME/GTK/imlib issue and not a Red Hat issue.

imlib and GNOME libraries are in heavy development and as such the
API will tend to break without a corresponding soname change.  Until
recently if you wanted GNOME you really needed to use it from CVS,
and certainly every time someone checks in a change they aren't going
to bump the soname as well.  Hopefully this trend will not continue
and we will start to see more frequent real releases with proper
sonames.

To be fair to the GNOME/GTK/imlib authors, we are working on a system
with library interdependencies the magnitude of which I don't think
anyone has ever seen before (at least in free software development).

-Marc