On Tue, 10 Jun 2003, Frederick Bruckman wrote:

: > Yes, this is the crux of the problem, and it has a solution that is simple
: > in concept but will require implementation work:  Look at the libraries'
: > version numbers.

: I think it would be inelegant to stuff pkgsrc with numerous ".if
: exists(libc.so.12.83.1) || exists(libc.so.12.90)".

Hence "will require implementation work".  This would need some support goop
to do dewey-like checking of version numbers.

: That reminds me, though: there are other uses for the library version
: numbers in pkgsrc. This proposal generated 0 responses, however:
:
:     http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-pkg/2003/05/03/0000.html

I kept away from it since I was the original flame-stoker, but I did find
the proposal palatable.  Your "Phase III" is *very* similar to the way RPM
does this, by looking up sonames in a database mapping back to packages.

However, sonames still don't fix the current thread's problem, where you
want to know that the library is at least of a given vintage (something that
is no longer encoded into binaries in ELF, because of truncated sonames).

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@pobox.com>