Re: Installation of JDK
On Fri, Mar 22, 2002 at 02:57:08PM -0500, timothy bauscher wrote:
> > > I had the same problem, so i linked
> > > libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2 ->
> > > libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3
> >
> > While this may happen to work most of the time, it isn't reliable. I
> > recommend not doing this when you can find the real library with the
> > correct soname anywhere at all.
>
> This is probably a stupid question, but shouldn't libraries be built
> with backwards compatibility in mind?
The world isn't perfect, and sometimes mistakes were made and need to be
corrected. When the soname (the bit at the end of the library filename)
is changed, that indicates that compatibility has been broken for one
reason or another. You may not notice it most of the time, as the change
may be in a rarely-used part of the library, but if anything ever does
call the thing that changed then it'll most likely crash immediately.
> Or perhaps we could ask Sun to simply build the SDK with forward
> compatibility in mind ? :-)
It's the standard C++ library, not Sun ...
> I just looked at the libraries in my /usr/lib, and it would appear
> that many of them are linked to other libraries.
That's different. Those are probably either links from
/usr/lib/libfoo.so to /usr/lib/libfoo.so.1 (which are for use when
compiling other software dependent on those libraries, not when running
it) or links to micro-versions of the libraries where the library
interface hasn't changed.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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