On the FAQ:
Why don't we put the libs in a different directory?
Basically, it's too complex. For the glibc transition, we could do this because
they used different dynamic linkers. For this transition, there is also little
to gain in having full backwards compatibility to the old ABI. The only gain is
that third party binary only applications that dynamically link to C++
using-libs (other than the stdc++ library itself) continue to work. The only
common case that comes to mind for this is libqt2 and kdelibs3. Both of these
packages are old, so to keep binary compatibility with previous versions of our
distribution (and some other distributions) is easy. We continue to build
libqt2 and all dependant packages with g++-2.95. Anything using libqt3, will
build with the new ABI, along with other C++ libraries.
I've thought having a directory for doing LD_LIBRARY_PATH might help people
keep compatibility
with other dists or legacy applications,
thoughts?
regards,
junichi
