Re: is /usr/lib*/libpsppire.so required for normal run of psppire?

[John Darrington]

On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 10:32:18PM +0100, Matej Cepl wrote:
     I am not a C programmer (just maintaining Fedora package of pspp) 
     so I am probably just confused. Please, take a look at 
     https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=471180 and tell what 
     you think. I thought that .so files are symlinks and useful only 
     for development against the library ... Moreover, my 
     /usr/lib*/lib*.so files are part of -devel packages on Fedora. On 
     the top of that, I cannot reproduce the bug on my system. Does 
     anybody have any idea? If yes, could you please comment to that 
     bug, please?


The short answer is yes, you need it.

For binaries which dynamically link against .so files, a common
convention is for binaries to link directly to libxxx.so.0 and
development packages, like you say, to have a symbolic filesystem link
from libxxx.so to libxxx.so.0

However, some programs (psppire is one of them) need to dynamically
*load* these .so files using the dlopen system call.  If they're not
available at run time, then problems will occur.  Whilst the program
will startup without libpsppire.so, it will fall over as soon as any
custom widgets need to be displayed (typically whenever a dialog box
is opened).

This rather clumsy situation is a consequence of how libglade manages
custom widgets, not part of the core gtk+ library.  In pspp "master"
version (0.7.x and up) libglade isn't used,  so there is no dynamic
loading and the situation is much neater.

I hope this helps.

J'

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