As some of you know, I don't have a complete Slackware installation. I have what I need, add stuff if the need arises, and do my own dependency checking.

I use geeqie as my all-purpose image viewer. The other day, I found a need for curl so I installed it. It didn't run the first time I tried it because it was missing one of its dependencies, a library called libcares/c-ares (which does dns processing apparently). So I thought "OK, I'll install that in a minute. I'm busy now.". Then I launched geeqie to look at something I happened to be working on at the time, and suddenly that didn't work either. When I launched it from a terminal (which is how I always investigate this sort of problem), I found it wanted libcares too. So I installed c-ares and then they both worked.

What I want to know is why geeqie worked before without libcares. It's now bound to libcurl, which is bound to libcares, so that explains the dependency, but how did it work before I installed curl/libcurl? And why would an image viewer want to do DNS checking anyway?

I don't know, but just count the libraries in the output of 'ldd /usr/bin/geeqie |more'

The guy obviously has a lot more features he's imagining he is going to put in.

This is the dependency tree:
So it's libexiv2 that requires curl.
Exiv2 itself is able to parse images from a website, eg:

1 members found this post helpful.

@business_kid
Wow!

In geeqie source i don't see explicit calls to libcurl, but there is a download_web_file function in src/ui-fileops.cc that is used in some dialogs. Perhaps curl is invoked there under the hood using the glib interface, and it wasn't before.

[EDIT] sorry didnt see all the replies

Cool. How did you get that tree btw? I'd like to be able to do that.

But why did libexiv work OK before I installed curl?

I guess it does not need curl every time, but there can be some cases when it is required. So it depends on the image you use.

Install https://slackbuilds.org/repository/1...tem/pax-utils/ , it contains a small utility called "lddtree"

1 members found this post helpful.

You should have aaa_libraries installed. It is a small collection of shared libraries programs need. For example, it has both libcares and libcurl. That's why the c-ares and curl packages are not needed to run for example geeqie.

1 members found this post helpful.

I wrote a little script a few days ago to find similar info. Unfortunately, I called it "lddtree", too... It's here: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...2/#post6490128. It shows separately the direct and indirect dependencies of a program or library. The output is different from your example.

1 members found this post helpful.

I was planning to install aaa-libraries this morning in my "free" period (pre-8.00 AM) as it's quite a bulky download, but then I saw that I could install c-ares by itself and it's only a few kb, so I did that instead.


PS: I must be going senile. Of course I already had aaa_libraries; it's that package that used to be called aaa_elflibs. But I must have had an earlier version with less in it.

A lot of programs with big dependencies uses dlopen or a library that mask the use of dlopen. The library the program want is tested and if it exists it is used. Here maybe libcurl has been tested as ok after been added, and then aborted due to the lack of libcares.

In geeqie, there seems to be libs that encapsulate dlopen.

1 members found this post helpful.

That's probably the explanation then.

So a new name could be "lddres", as in resolver, or reside. Problem (re-)solved.