Problem with shared libraries

[Bob Proulx]

Continuing the split message that was over 4kb...

Stefaan de Keersmaeker wrote:
> Running ldconfig doesn;'t help either.

The ldconfig command is just a tool for managing those symlinks just
like the 'ln -s' from the command line.  (But knowledgeable about
libraries and safer and so forth.)  The rpm command does not know
about anything built by ldconfig either.

> I even copied this library from another RH9 system which does have this
> installed but no good.

The rpm database does not know about your copied file.

> Should I force an RPM install of gd-1.8.4-11.i386.rpm ? Not sure about doing
> that, can installing an older package create problems for the newer one or
> can they coexist?

Since they have different versions the packages can coexist on the
same system.  But one of the problems of rpm is that the same package
name can exist on the system multiple times.  This is a feature to
allow multiple versions of shared libraries to exist at the same
time.  But if you --upgrade it removes the old package as it installs
the new package.  So you have to know to --install newer packages onto
the system when there are multiple packages.

And those multiple packages need to have a non-overlapping set of
files.  If one installs /usr/lib/libgd.so.1.8 and the other installs
/usr/lib/libgd.so.2.0 then there is no overlap and everything is fine.
But if one installs /usr/share/gd/README and the other installs
/sur/share/gd/README too then those packages overlap and would produce
a file conflict.  That is bad.  In any case, you need to know these
details in order to decide if you can have both of them on the system
at the same time and whether --force is an okay thing to do in this
case or not.

Bob