Re: Opening libraries by soname

[Paolo Bonzini]

> > In debian, libncurses.so is not installed unless libncurses-dev is 
> > also installed.  Therefore, programs should open libncurses.so.5 
> > directly.
>
> No. Ideally the installation script for your program would create a 
> symlink from a private directory for your program to the libncurses that 
> your program should open, which would probably point to the SONAME symlink.

Good idea.  How do I find the SONAME symlink portably, though?

One possibility could be to require the -dev package when building, 
create a program that links against -lncurses, and use ldd or 
equivalents to find the SONAME -- but again, ldd is not portable...

Paolo