Re: Versions of shared libraries

[Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net>]

On 15 Jul 2005, Jarosław Tabor wrote:
> Hi all!
>
> This is probably not the best list, but it may also be important from
> security point of view. 

You were right - this isn't the best list. :/

> I've tried to check the version of some lib from my program, and it
> looks, that the only way is to check it by dpkg. 

Try this:

] ldd -v -r /path/to/my/binary

> As this is not the best way, I think, that it would be a good idea to
> have in every library some function, i.e. called libraryname_ver,
> which will return the current version of library. I did it for few my
> private libs, and I'm very happy with this. What you think about it ?

I think you will have a lot of difficulty convincing upstream package
maintainers to incorporate this into their packages, and have an awful
lot of people that *you* will need to talk to in order to get it done.

Also, I think that you will be sadly disappointed with the results even
if you *do* manage to achieve your goal:  there are at least two
versions of any library in Debian - the upstream soname version and the
package version, which do not match exactly.

Your proposal, at present, does not address this issue, or the issue of
any additional version numbers that may be relevant to the task at hand.

Regards,
        Daniel
-- 
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
        -- L P Hartley, _The Go-Between_