krb5 libraries and circular dependencies

[Simo Sorce]

On Fri, 28 May 2010 15:32:07 -0400
Sam Hartman <hartmans at MIT.EDU> wrote:

> If the krb5 build system didn't use rpath, I think it would be fairly
> unlikely that a plugin would get a different libkrb5 than the
> application.  However, since rpath is used, I guess it is reasonably
> easy to have this happen.

In some distributions rPath is forbidden exactly for these reasons, and
needs an exception to be granted in order to be allowed for any single
package.

But of course if someone installs the libraries by themselves or don't
have strict rules, bad things can happen. But then again do you really
need to care about that?

Is it worth the effort trying to prevent these corner cases ? After
all, there is always a way to do something wrong. For example how do
you deal with someone patching "incompatibly" their kerberos libs but
not changing the version number ? You wouldn't detect a case like this
anyway most probably and yet it could definitely break.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York