Detecting shared library problems

Ben Stanley bds02@uow.edu.au
Wed, 07 Mar 2001 09:33:33 +1100


The bane of a GNUCash user's life seems to be getting all the shared
libraries installed - and learning what a shared library is etc. One
would hope that rpm and other packaging systems would look after this
for us, but a recent posting to the gnucash-users list would seem to
indicate that this is a continuing problem.

I have a suggestion to remedy this problem. The error must be able to be
trapped somehow. When the error occurs, if we could print out a message
pointing to a local file and perhaps a URL (with identical contents)
which explains the problem and what to do about it, and has links to
pages with explanations particular to each OS / packaging system.
Perhaps these explanations already exist in the form of a HOWTO
somewhere? Or perhaps Robert Merkel's recent post "Problem after
installation" could be used as a starting point.

I have recently found that I am able to type a library file name into
http://www.rpmfind.net, and it will give me a list of packages which
provide it. I just have to find the one for my OS, and hope that it's on
my CDs so I don't have to download it :-). Unfortunately it doesn't
solve the problem of long dependency chains, but I have been able to
find out that library X is supplied by package Y without having to have
magical knowledge...

Ben.

--
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 Ben Stanley - PhD Student
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