[csw-maintainers] Symlinks to shared libraries

[Philip Brown]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 2:43 AM, Maciej (Matchek) Blizinski
<maciej at opencsw.org> wrote:
> I just got a review of my NSPR build from a NSPR/NSS developer,
> Wan-Teh Chang.  One of the comments was to stop creating a symlink to
> a shared library.  By default, nspr creates bare *.so files.  My build
> script renamed them to *.so.$(MINOR_VERSION) and created symlinks from
> *.so to *.so.$(MINOR_VERSION).
>
>  > ls -l /opt/csw/lib/nspr/libnspr4.so*
> lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     other         13 Nov 23 23:46
> /opt/csw/lib/nspr/libnspr4.so -> libnspr4.so.8
> -rwxr-xr-x   1 root     bin       324344 Nov 23 23:02
> /opt/csw/lib/nspr/libnspr4.so.8
>
> Do we have any policy which requires creating symlinks?  I'm afraid
> that shipping bare unversioned libraries is going to create problems
> during updates.
>

as James has pointed out, the core issue here is the SONAME.

since the SONAME is unversioned, you may as well just stop messing
around with the renaming/symlink.

With other libraries, I'd be worried. However, since they have an
EXPLICIT commitment to compatibility between versions (and if they
ever broke it, people would scream bloody murder), I think it is ok in
this specific situation.