> Greetings!
>
> I would like to know if an older version of a required library can be used
> with those programs that require certain libraries to work without any
> problems. i.e. I am currently using debian slink 2.1 with the icewm window
> manager and I want to install sawmill but then sawmill requires certain
> libraries to work but what i have are older versions of those libraries. Are
> those required by sawmill or any other programs example, everybuddy, need
> specific versions of required libraries or older versions of libraries can
> be used?
Short answer: Package dependencies should work to ensure that you have
the proper library versions installed. If you can install a package,
satisfying all dependencies, and it doesn't work due to a library
problem, then that is a bug, and should be reported.
Long answer:
Each shared library has a "soname", which consists of a name and a
version number. For example, "libc6" is the soname for the current
version of the libc standard C library. Sonames are used to
distinguish between incompatable library versions. A program compiled
with libc5 will not work with libc6, or vice versa. But a program
compiled against any version of libc6 should work with any other
version of libc6. It is possible to have multiple versions of the same
library installed, as long as they have different sonames.
Debian chooses to include the soname of a library in the package name,
so that programs can depend on specific sonames for libraries. This
arrangement allows Debian packages to emulate the semantics of the
libraries themselves -- two packages with the same name should be
equivilant, and packages with different hames can be co-installed. It
is the responsibility of the package maintainer to make sure the
library dependencies are properly reflected in the package
dependencies. This way, installing the right packages so all package
dependencies are taken care of automatically ensures that the library
dependenceis are also met.
>
> Any info would be greatly appreciated.
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