Re: Links for Libraries

[david@elo.ods.com (David Engel)]

Stephen Early writes:
> On Tue, 4 Jun 1996, Ian Jackson wrote:
> > The best way is for the package to create the link libfoo.so to
> > libfoo.so.x rather than to libfoo.so.x.y - this will involve less
> > mucking about when then library version changes.
> 
> I did this for a version of the xlib/xdevel packages, but was told not to
> by David Engel. He suggests making the .so -> .so.x.y link be part of the
> devel package. I didn't argue. 

Stephen is right.  The .so symlink should point to .so.x.y.  This is
because the .so symlink, which is provided in the -dev packages, is
used for linking by ld and must point to the specific library which
matches the header files in the -dev package.  If the .so symlink
points to the .so.x symlink, as Ian suggests, the .so symlink and
header files can get out of sync if the user installs a newer library,
obtained from somewhere else, and runs ldconfig.

David
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