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Date:Mon Mar 12 07:49:41 2001 
Subject:Re: Installing poplog: some bugs and some thoughts 
From:Aaron Sloman See text for reply address 
Volume-ID:1010312.02 

[To reply replace "Aaron.Sloman.XX" with "A.Sloman"]

Andrew writes, responding to Steve

> Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2001 15:32:29 +0000 (UTC)
>
> On Fri, Mar 09, 2001 at 04:28:14PM +0000, Stephen Isard wrote:
> >
> > Cost in money is not the only reason people might have for not upgrading
> > an otherwise working system.  I agree that poplog ought to run on new
> > distributions as well as old, but I'd be unhappy to see a policy of
> > "you can't run poplog without upgrading to the latest".
>
> I agree that we shouldn't force people to upgrade, but at the moment
> Poplog is almost forcing people to downgrade, since you can't run poplog
> without making your system bug-compatible with Red Hat 6.0.

I don't recognise this. It ran immediately when I installed it on a Dell
laptop running RedHat 7, maybe because our computer operators had
already made the link to allow other X11 stuff to work: they were not
checking out Poplog. The machine has these in /usr/X11R6/lib
laptop-11126% lt libX11*

lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           13 Jan  4 18:51 libX11.so -> libX11.so.6.1
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           13 Jan  4 18:43 libX11.so.6 -> libX11.so.6.1
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root       843812 Aug 30  2000 libX11.so.6.1
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root      1292398 Aug 30  2000 libX11.a
laptop-11127%

> Poplog links to libX11,so, which (in RH6) is a symlink to the real libX11
> (libX11.so.6, I think) - I have no idea why RH6 made that symlink, but it
> seems to have stopped doing so after version 6, so all modern
> distributions need to re-create that symlink to get Poplog to work.

That sounds like a bad mistake made by RedHat. It would require other
X utilities to be relinked also (as I said, the link was already there
when I installed poplog on RedHat 7, and I did not put it there for
poplog.)

A similar issue arises with the requirement to get Motif working, which
is not provided by Redhat but has to be installed separately. After
installation, a symbolic link may be rquired to make the new version
accessible without rebuilding all motif-dependent software.

That may be a fault in the motif installation package, or it may be
deliberate in case people wish to keep old and new versions of motif
running concurrently. (e.g. Lesstif and Motif).

Requiring a relink every time you produce a minor upgrade to a part of
the system would be BAD software engineering. Poplog should be able to
go on working without a relink, as long as the new system is made
"current" by symbolic links to the main address.

If there is a major new version that cannot work without complete
relinking then that's different.

> The proper file to link to (libX11.so.6) is the same in every distribution
> of Linux I've used (including RH6), so making the change wouldn't cause
> anyone any problems.

I expect it's trivial to do, but I'll have to find out how, and that is
one of hundreds of things I don't have time for just now.

It may simply require editing one of the files in $usepop/pop/com/*

But grep shows only references to X11, not X11.so. So maybe it has
something to do with the linker running when Poplog is built.

Must rush
Aaron
====
Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ )
School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
EMAIL A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk   (ReadATas@please !)
PAPERS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/
FREE TOOLS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html