[Xquartz-dev] Why are dylib symlinks backwards?

[Peter O'Gorman]

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