Re: Problem with changing symbolic link to shared library

[Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org>]

On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 11:43:54PM +0200, Marko Randjelovic <marel@sbb.co.yu> was heard to say:
> Yesterday, I have changed some symbolic links in /usr/lib32 to point to
> older version libraries. For example, there was
> 
> libxml2.so.2 -> libxml2.so.2.6.30
> 
> I have changed it to libxml2.so.2.6.27 and my printer stared to work.
> But after I run 'apt-get upgrade', it returns to its original state. How
> to prevent this? I think something is choosing the highest version.

  ldconfig(8) maintains those symlinks.  I'm guessing (I don't want to
download the whole source to libc just to find this out) that it
probably deliberately chooses the latest compatible version of the library
since that's normally what you want.  It would be interesting to know
why your printer works with an older version but not a newer one; that
sounds like a bug.

  It would also be interesting to know how you ended up with two different
versions of libxml2; there should only be one and it should be in the
package libxml2.  What does the command "dpkg -S '/usr/lib/libxml2.so.*'"
print?

  Daniel