On Thu, Nov 14, 2002 at 11:19:44PM +0000, Mark Marsella wrote: > > Might be, but normally new old libs are subsets of new and so function. > (unless of course they have been totally rewritten).
No. Not if they are doing soname versioning correctly. If the new version is ABI-compatible with the old version, you only bump the minor version. If it's ABI-incompatible (stuff needs to be rebuilt against the new version of the library), you bump the major version number. Of course, doing the symlinking thing *might* work for you if the application uses a subset of the library's interface which hasn't changed or if the developers are randomly bumping the major number for no reason. But it *is* dangerous. Particularly with applications linked against svgalib which, iirc, have to be suid root to run correctly... A quick Google search turns up this paper which almost certainly explains it better than I do: http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/als2000/full_papers/browndavid/browndavid_html/ -- Right now, there are scr1pt k1dd13s plotting to DDoS my network, my co-lo server is not responding to pings and the people that I IRC with may be involved in both. I'm sysadmin Graeme Mathieson and this is the longest day of my life. http://www.wossname.org.uk/~mathie/ _______________________________________________ Scottish mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/scottish