Hi Juanjo! On Sat, 30 Aug 2008 09:19:19 +0200, Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll wrote:

On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 1:07 AM, Luca Capello <luca@pca.it> wrote:

...

This bug has nothing to do with the rpath issue (now solved [1]). Thus, the problem remains: is there any particular reason for /usr/lib/libecl.so not providing a SONAME?

That is not something ECL has to provide. It is more a configuration option that operating systems may provide.

Sorry, I'm not a skilled programmed, but I don't understand why this is not ECL task: ECL provides the libecl.so library, so who else should provide its SONAME?

You have to consider the following: with every binary release we are adding more functions and the names of old ones change. That means being a rapidly evolving project we are definitely going to break binary compatibility very frequently.

Isn't this the reason for SONAME existence? At least this is how I see it and it seems that others share my view [1][2].

I should rather say with every release.

This means that you need to update the SONAME for every release. And I don't see this as a stopper.

Furthermore, ECL is currently not being used as a library by any project. It is only either a runtime for compiled files or the interpreted environment itself.

However a standalone program [3] works out of the box with just libecl.so, doesn't it? This means that while ecl (the executable) is not used as a library, libecl.so acts like a *real* library (as Gabriel Dos Reis already pointed out [4]). Thus, without a SONAME and from a simple `ldd` output, there's no way to know which ECL versions the program was built with.

Do you expect SBCL to use some kind of SONAME for its core? Not really.

SBCL doesn't provide any library which can be used *without* its core (thus they are installed into /usr/lib/sbcl/, the same being true for e.g. CLISP). Similarly, the ECL "libraries" needed for the core reside in /usr/lib/ecl/ and don't need any SONAME. In the next days I'll upload a new Debian version for ECL to solve bug #495756 [5] in time for the lenny release [6]. I'd like to solve this issue as well, is it possible? Thx, bye, Gismo / Luca Footnotes: [1] http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-toolchain/1998/07/17/0000.html [2] http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Library-related_Commands_and_Files#sonam... NB, not that I blindly trust random wikis... [3] New manual: "1.6.3. Example of standalone program" [4] Message-ID: <206fcf960808300836h69a9ecc5heaba09277f08b84e@mail.gmail.com> [5] http://bugs.debian.org/495756 [6] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLenny