Help with clarification on shared library naming convention
 

My understanding is that for shared libraries there is usually a set of symbolic links to facilitate applications finding the right version. For example

libfoo.so.1.1.1 (actual library)
libfoo.so.1.1 -> libfoo.so.1.1.1
libfoo.so.1 -> libfoo.so.1.1.1

My question is that for library libX.so.a.b.c are the symbolic links:
libX.so.a.b
libX.so.a
considered necessary and should be created by ldconfig ?

My experience is with compiling the GLEW library locally and then running make install but it only created the following:
libGLEW.so.1.9.0 (actual shared library)
libGLEW.so.1.9 -> libGLEW.so.1.9.0
libGLEW.so -> libGLEW.so.1.9.0

It's missing the
libGLEW.so.1 -> libGLEW.so.1.9.0
which I would think should exist as well.

Running ld config also does not create this libGLEW.so.1
Is this expected behavior ? If so what is the rule/explanation about this ?

Thanks

Hi,

I think you've got this kind of backward. The symbolic links are there for building against a library not running running against it.

You'll get the symbolic links from libFoo.so.x.y to libFoo.so.x and libFoo.so if you install the libFoo-dev package (libFoo.so.x.y will be in the libFoo package). At run time a given the program knows to look for the same libFoo.so.x.y that was used when it was built, but the build itself just looks for libFoo.so.

Evo2.

Thanks for the reply,

So you are saying that in the case above there will never be any app that will try to look for libGLEW.so.1 ?

Or should I say is it illegal/against convention that an app can be linked to a library with only major version number such as libGLEW.so.1 instead of libGLEW.so.1.9 ?

How does ldconfig determine that only the libGLEW.so.1.9 symbolic link should be created and not libGLEW.so.1 ?
I just would like to find out the logic/reasoning behind it.

Thanks again

Hi,
Correct, this should not be needed by anything at runtime.

I think the changes between minor version numbers of libGLEW (eg 1.5 to 1.9) would mean that it makes no sense to specify just the major version number (ie just "1").


That is a good question and one that I don't know the answer to. But in the case of a the libglew(-dev) package on my Debian system there is also no libGLEW.so.1

Evo2.