[tex-live] libXaw.so.6 vs. .7

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Karl Berry suggests on Mon, 8 Mar 2004 11:09:32 -0500 that the
GNU/Linux TeXlive builds should be done linking against libXaw.so.6
instead of .7.

Here is the situation for libXaw support on various GNU/Linux
distributions:

	My Red Hat 8 and 9 systems have .6, .6.1, and .7 in
	/usr/X11R6/lib/, as does Fedora 1, all on Intel IA-32, and Red
	Hat Advanced Server 2.1 on IA-64 has all three as well.

	My Red Hat 6 systems on Alpha and SPARC have only .6 and .6.1.

	My Yellowdog 2.3 systems on PowerPC have .6, .6.1, and .7.

	Debian 3.0 on Intel IA-32 has .6, .6.1, and .7.

	Red Hat 7.2 on Alpha has .6, .6.1, and .7.

	Slackware 9.1 on Intel IA-32 has .6, .6.1, and .7.

	SuSE 8.0 on Intel IA-32 has .6, .6.1, and .7.

Here is the status for libXaw support on other O/Ses:

	My MacOS 10.1.x and 10.3.2 systems have .6, .6.1, and .7.

	My FreeBSD 4.4 system on on Intel IA-32 has only .6, while
	FreeBSD 4.9, 5.0, and 5.1 on Intel IA-32 have .6 and .7.

	OpenBSD 3.2 on Intel IA-32 has .6.1 and .7.

	NetBSD 1.6 on Intel IA-32 has .6, .6.1, and .7.

	Sun Solaris 9 (SPARC and x86) has only .4 and .5.

I conclude that GNU/Linux releases that lack libXaw.so.7 must be older
than Red Hat 7.  Sites that are that far behind are vulnerable to
numerous security holes that have been patched in more recent
releases.  Our last remaining Red Hat 7.x systems here were upgraded
to 9.0 over the weekend.

An alternative, and probably better, solution is to link against
libXaw.a, eliminating the nasty dependence on shared library versions.
In the TeXlive-2003/9 CDs, the texlive/bin/i386-linux executables have
these shared library dependencies:

	% ldd * | grep '=>' | awk '{print $1}' | sort -u
	libc.so.6
	libdl.so.2
	libICE.so.6
	/lib/ld-linux.so.2
	libm.so.6
	libncurses.so.4
	libSM.so.6
	libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2
	libX11.so.6
	libXaw.so.6
	libXext.so.6
	libXmu.so.6
	libXt.so.6

initex and virtex depend only on libc.so.6 and libm.so.6, while inimf
and virmf depend on those two, plus these:

        /lib/ld-linux.so.2
        libICE.so.6
        libSM.so.6
        libX11.so.6
        libXext.so.6
        libXt.so.6
        libdl.so.2

Only two executables depend on libXaw.so.6: oxdvi.bin and xdvi.bin:
collectively, they depend on:

	% ldd oxdvi.bin xdvi.bin | grep '=>' | awk '{print $1}' | sort -u
	libc.so.6
	libdl.so.2
	libICE.so.6
	/lib/ld-linux.so.2
	libm.so.6
	libSM.so.6
	libX11.so.6
	libXaw.so.6
	libXext.so.6
	libXmu.so.6
	libXt.so.6

Why can all of the binaries in the TeXlive CD not be linked statically?
Would the sizes of the bin directories grow so much that the CD would
overflow again?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe  -
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