shared libraries: missing soname

On 20 November 2016 at 21:49, Joseph Mingrone wrote:
| Hello Dirk,
| 
| Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> writes:
| 
| > On 20 November 2016 at 19:28, Joseph Mingrone wrote:
| > | Hello,
| > | 
| > | R's shared libraries are linked without setting the soname.  This is causing problems for some consumers.
| > | 
| > |         Error: /usr/local/lib/R/library/tseries/libs/tseries.so is linked to
| > |         /usr/local/lib/R/lib/libRblas.so which does not have a SONAME.  math/R needs
| > |         to be fixed.
| > | 
| > | What's the correct way to add the necessary linker flags?  I believe it should be something like this.
| > | 
| > |        cc -shared -Wl,-soname,...
| 
| > I think that may be true "in theory" (for libraries loaded by ldd(8) via
| > `/etc/ld.conf`) but not "in practice" for R which loads these shared
| > libraries itself (via dlopen(3) etc).
| 
| R may use dlopen() but other customers may not.

Yes, well, but are there other customers?

| > For what it is worth, I have been providing the Debian packages "as is" for
| > now 15+ years and nobody has complained. 
| 
| > What system are you on to get that complaint?
| 
| This is on FreeBSD.  Our apt-get, pkg, will not register shared library dependencies if the shared library does not have a soname.  If the library
| gets changed and is no longer compatible with the previous version, and there is no soname to check, pkg will not know that all its dependencies
| need to be reinstalled.

Hmpf. No mechanism for fallback / default soname?  In that case you (or
whoever acts as FreeBSD maintainer) may have to supply one.