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Date:Mon May 2 17:36:51 2003 
Subject:A thought about linking to changing libraries 
From:Aaron Sloman 
Volume-ID:1030502.03 


A recurring problem with installing linux poplog has been the naming
of library files requiring links to be inserted, e.g. a link from

    /usr/X11R6/lib/libXm.so.3

to

    /usr/X11R6/lib/libXm.so

in RedHat 8.

This is now proving also to be a problem with libXt, libXext and
libX11

I am not happy with the solution that requires telling people to
insert symbolic links in system libraries.

Following a suggestion from one of our computer officers, I've just
tried doing the following:

    Insert suitably named symbolic links from $popexternlib to
    the appropriate files in /usr/X11R6/lib/
E.g. link

    /usr/X11R6/lib/libXm.so.3

to
    /usr/local/poplog/pop/extern/lib/libXm.so

Then alter the re-linking command file

    $popsys/poplink_cmnd

so that the lines
    -lXm \
    -lXt \
    -lXext \
    -lX11 \

Come before
    -L/usr/X11R6/lib \

That enables the new poplog to be linked without doing anything in
/usr/X11R6/lib

Now I can put links in there that I know will work for redhat 8
but they may not work for something else, e.g. a version of
linux that has libXm.so.4 etc.

I can have instructions that tell the user to change the links
in $popexternlib but they are going to be messy.

Can anyone think of any objection to this, or how to make it
cleaner?

Another possibility would be to copy the library files and
distribute them with poplog in $popexternlib

-rwxr-xr-x    1 root       903248 Sep  6  2002 /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6.2
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root        53264 Sep  6  2002 /usr/X11R6/lib/libXext.so.6.4
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root       328944 Sep  6  2002 /usr/X11R6/lib/libXt.so.6.0
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root      2684934 Aug 27  2002 /usr/X11R6/lib/libXm.so.3.0.1

Or put them in a separate tar file that can be un-tarred into that
directory (with symbolic links to the .so version).

I think this is all XFree stuff with a licence that is similar to
that of poplog's.

However that could lead to compatibility problems with whatever else
is on the linux system.

Any suggestions?

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/ (And free book on Philosophy of AI)
FREE TOOLS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html