[lsb-discuss] Lacking Standard Symlinks in Linux Standards Base

Alexey Eremenko al4321 at gmail.com
Fri Aug 25 03:31:10 PDT 2006


Hello - there was a discussion few days ago on openSUSE mailing lists
about compatibility.

The main problem is that moving between Windows versions you get 90%
of compatibility and on Linux only 30% of compatibility.

I have made some test with klik - a new package manager that can
install Debian Software on any RPM-based Linux out there. And found
that while it works nice on SUSE (80% success) it fails miserably on
Fedora (with 30% success).... after digging a bit I found that there
are big differences in symlinks between different Linux versions - and
that hurts compatibility a lot.

For example on SUSE distro there might be libfoo-1.2.3 with symlink to
"libfoo" and no such symlink on Fedora. Since you can't have
cross-Linux app to link against specific lib version you link it vs.
general API - that is the "libfoo" symlink. Since some symlinks is
lacking on some distros, some cross-Linux software refuses to run.

Unfortunately, the latest LSB v3.1 has no standards for symlinks.

I would like to make some more tests and, probably, create such a topic in LSB.

What do you think ?
Do we (community) need standarized symlinks?

I think we do, at least for common libraries.




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