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Date:      Thu, 04 Feb 1999 08:25:40 -0500
From:      "Kaleb S. KEITHLEY" <kaleb@ics.com>
To:        hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: ldconfig and libraries
Message-ID:  <36B99FD3.41C67EA6@ics.com>
References:  <199901311851.KAA07228@vashon.polstra.com> <199902040322.TAA18413@vashon.polstra.com>

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John Polstra wrote:
> 
> In article <36B700D2.41C67EA6@ics.com>,
> Kaleb S. KEITHLEY <kaleb@ics.com> wrote:
> >
> > ldconfig for ELF should just go away.
> 
> Feel free to remove it from your system.  

Wrong solution to the problem.

> It's not going to go away in
> FreeBSD any time soon.  You witnessed the outcry when I tried to argue
> against it months ago.  

Non sequitur. ldconfig is redundant at best, presents a minor security
risk, and the last time I tried it allowed for demonstrably incorrect or
unexpected behavior. 

System admins who think they know better be damned -- they're not
supporting the products they're breaking. If someone calls up and tells
me they installed my product somewhere other than where the install was
supposed to put it, tried to kludge it with ldconfig, and now the
product doesn't work correctly, the first thing I'm going to tell them
is to reinstall it in the correct, supported, location and let the
program's RPATH and ld.so do what they're supposed to do.

> There's no point in your bringing it up over
> and over again. It's here to stay.  Just get over it.  I did. :-)

You seem to be under the delusion that you're signing my paycheck or
something. I'll lobby for its removal as long as it stays in the
release. You may not see the point, and I don't care if you do or don't 
see the point. Put me in your killfile if you don't want to see me lobby
for fixing a serious bug.

And you give up too easily too.

> > > an ELF shared library must have a name
> > > that ends with ".so." followed by exactly one version number, like
> > > this:
> > >
> > >     libfoo.so.12
> > >
> >
> > On other ELF systems (since I haven't looked that closely at FreeBSD's
> > ELF implementation) the version is a string. The string may have any
> > value, e.g. "foo", "a-really-long-and-silly-string" or "3".
> >
> > The linker doesn't care, it merely records the fully qualified name of
> > the library, including the version string, in the program's NEEDED. The
> > run-time loader doesn't care, it loads the exact library by name, as
> > recorded in the program's NEEDED.
> 
> That is the case for FreeBSD too.  The question was about ldconfig,
> not about the dynamic linker.

I think you miss the point. In ELF the "version" is a string with no
semantics. You said it had to be a single number. That's wrong. And it's
wrong whether we're talking about ldconfig, ld, or ld.so.

--
Kaleb

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