Martin Costabel wrote:
Here is a question I always wanted to ask:
Why are most of the symlinks in Leopard's /usr/X11/lib backwards?
Here is an example: `ls -l /usr/X11R6/lib/libGLU*b` shows
on Tiger: 1124148 Nov 7 2006 /usr/X11R6/lib/libGLU.1.3.dylib 16 Nov 16 2006 /usr/X11R6/lib/libGLU.1.dylib -> libGLU.1.3.dylib 16 Nov 16 2006 /usr/X11R6/lib/libGLU.dylib -> libGLU.1.3.dylib which makes a lot of sense, but
on Leopard: 14 Oct 28 13:12 /usr/X11R6/lib/libGLU.1.3.dylib -> libGLU.1.dylib 3304064 Sep 24 07:21 /usr/X11R6/lib/libGLU.1.dylib 14 Oct 28 13:12 /usr/X11R6/lib/libGLU.dylib -> libGLU.1.dylib which does not make sense.
Apple's version of GNU libtool does this. IIRC when it first did so, it was because one of the tools (I forget which) requires the install_name to be the actual library, not a symlink. Without the change there would be a libfoo.1.dylib and libfoo.1.3.dylib both with actual code because of the way that tool worked. With the way it is now with Apple's libtool there is a useless symlink, but at least the filenames generated by the same version of GNU libtool upstream are the same and it is unlikely that anyones tools or scripts would break. Tiger's version did not use GNU libtool. Should we (upstream GNU libtool) ever get around to releasing libtool-2.x there will be one library and one symlink (libfoo.dylib -> libfoo.1.dylib), with no useless symlink. Peter -- Peter O'Gorman http://pogma.com