Hi,
As Mary and James said, the symlinks at /opt/SUNWmlib were installed
for backward compatibility, per ARC requirement. They were installed
from the following two packages:
SUNWmlibk
SUNWmlibl
I am not sure about external users' dependency on those symlinks.
For Sun internal users, AFAIK, only some of the GNOME packages have
a "soft" dependency on the SUNWmlib package which installs libraries
to /usr/lib/. I cc'd Brian Cameron from the GNOME/JDS team, in case
he has a comment/correction.
Thanks,
-James Cheng
On 2006/10/19 09:51 AM, mary ding wrote:
> James and Jens:
>
> I believe the SUNWmlib package is created when they bundled the
> unbundled media libraries into S10. It is created for backward
> compatability reason. James Cheng was the engineer that worked on this.
>
>
>
> James Carlson wrote:
>> Jens Elkner writes:
>>
>>> Hmmm, currently I'm trying to strip down a zone Sol10 06/06
>>> environment (e.g. freeing /opt).
>>> Since SUNWmlib gets installed on /opt per default I wanna remove
>>> it.
>>
>>
>> % du -sh /opt/SUNWmlib
>> 86K /opt/SUNWmlib
>> %
>> I'm not sure 86KB of disk space (consisting of a handful of symlinks)
>> is really worth the effort.
>>
>>
>>> I think, this should have no impact at all, because no package has
>>> it listed in its depend file.
>>
>>
>> Unfortunately, not every dependency that's important for proper
>> operation of the software is listed in the 'depend' file. Yes, that's
>> a failing on our part, but the truth is that if you wander outside the
>> confines of the supported metaclusters, and you don't take the time to
>> analyze the software itself carefully, it's all too easy to hurt
>> yourself.
>>
>> Yes, it should be otherwise. It should be possible to remove packages
>> and have the system tell you whether that's a safe thing to do.
>>
>> Also, you can't just remove the /opt/SUNWmlib directory without
>> removing the SUNWmlib package, and that *is* required by other
>> software. Just do an ldd on some applications, and you'll see well
>> over a hundred that are linked to it.
>>
>>
>>> But knowing this, the next question comes into mind: What is the
>>> purpose of SUNWmlib? Is it a kind of backward compat package or
>>> optional performance related package?
>>
>>
>> The links in /opt are for backward compatibility with applications
>> that may have been linked against these libraries before they were
>> moved to /usr/lib.
>>
>
>
