[ale] upgrading glibcx to glibc2.2.4...........

[Joe Knapka]

Dow Hurst <dhurst at kennesaw.edu> writes:

> I thought that an install of a new glibc would require all apps
> depending on glibc to be recompiled with the new glibc or they would
> segfault, not run, or something along those lines.  Am I in looneyland
> or the linuxlibrary? ;-)

No, no. ldconfig and ld.so are all about managing library version
changes.  Apps know what version of the library they're built against,
and ldconfig ensures that each library can be found at a location in
the filesystem that accurately reflects its version number.  Your
current glibc is, say, /lib/libc.so.2.0.1.  When you install a new
glibc, it will get a name like /lib/libc.so.2.2.0. When old apps
start, they say, "Hey, ld.so, find libc.so.2.0.1 and link it to me",
and as long as you've left the old install alone, that will work
fine. When you compile new stuff, it gets linked against the latest
version of the library that's available, and when starting up it asks
to link with libc.so.2.2.0. So there's no need to recompile everything
in the world just to upgrade your glibc.

The same principle applies to other .so's as well. As long as you
don't throw away the old libs, existing apps should work fine. If you
*want* the old apps to use the new lib for some reason, of course you
have to rebuild them. Also, you should *not* keep the header files
(*.h) from the old lib around, because that will screw you when you
try to compile stuff against the new lib. (And of course, none of this
is relevant to statically-linked executables, which encapsulate all
the code on which they depend within the exe.)

Cheers,

-- Joe Knapka

> Dow
> 
> 
> Courtney Thomas wrote:
> 
> > First, should I upgrade to the highest available or only to 2.2.4
> > which is the minimum a desired application requires, or to 2.3.2
> > i.e. the latest ?
> >
> > How should this new glibc be installed, taking into consideration
> > that the old glibcx is currently running ?
> >
> > Thank you.
> 
> 
> -- 
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