Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
Hi,
This issue has come up before in a fcl-db discussion regarding the
Firebird Database, where the libfbclient.so was missing from many
Linux distros (eg: Ubuntu 10.04), but a libfbclient.so.2.0 was
available instead. FCL-DB only checks for the unversioned shared
libraries, thus your application will probably not run out of the box.
I've stumbled across this problem again today with OpenSUSE 12.1 and
Synapse where I send emails from inside my applications via a secure
SMTP connection. The Synapse library is looking for libssl.so, but by
default OpenSUSE only has libssl.so.1.0.0.
In both these cases, I manually created unversioned symlinks to those
libraries, and that got my applications working again. This is not
ideal, but I don't know how else to handle this.
Quite a long way from ideal, since it implies that an administrator has
to be involved even if the program is only sitting in an unprivileged
user's home directory (or is a symlink in ~ good enough?).
I'm tempted to say that this is a distro issue, and that if an upstream
project (FireBird, OpenSSL, PostgreSQL) normally publishes an
unversioned library that a distro is at fault if it "decorates" it with
an appended version number without providing a symlink chain.
I'd suggest that the best solution would be for FPC policy to mandate
that all shared library (.so etc.) usage in the RTL/FCL/LCL should be
capable of taking a library name parameter, and for application code to
allow this name to be specified in a .ini file. I think this would be
safer than having the app try to deduce the location of the appropriate
file, since sooner or later there will be a case where it sees multiple
versions and selects the wrong one, or assumes that e.g. /usr/local/opt
is permanently available when in fact it's a short-term NFS mount.
And doing it that way means that the user would be aware of the problem,
and if enough users are aware of the problem it might trickle through to
the awareness of the distreaux maintainers.
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
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