A lesson [LWN.net]

A lesson

Posted Sep 26, 2012 11:02 UTC (Wed) by Otus (subscriber, #67685)
In reply to: A lesson by Company
Parent article: GStreamer 1.0 released

> You cannot install the same GStreamer application for both 0.10 and 1.0.
>
> You only have one Totem, one Pitivi and one Cheese application on your
> computer. And most likely your distro will not even let you choose which
> one.
>
> So in that sense GStreamer is just like the desktops.

Can an application like Totem support both 0.10 and 1.0?

But I'm not sure what you mean, since of course you can have two Totems or
Cheeses. I have several versions of some applications. They just have to be
installed in /opt or ~/whatever.

to post comments

A lesson

Posted Sep 26, 2012 22:46 UTC (Wed) by Company (guest, #57006) [Link] (2 responses)

No, an application cannot support both at the same time because there'd be name collisions.

You can of course install the application twice, once into /usr and once into /opt. But that works for GNOME or KDE, too. In fact, GNOME development is done that way. Everyone has the distro's GNOME installed in /usr and a jhbuild somewhere in the home directory or /opt.

A lesson

Posted Oct 1, 2012 14:31 UTC (Mon) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (1 responses)

> No, an application cannot support both at the same time because there'd be name collisions.

Well, it could if the library used symbol versioning

There's lots and lots of features in shared libraries to make backward compatibility work. But it seems that glibc is the only library out there that uses it (thank god, it makes glibc upgrades extremely safe).

A lesson

Posted Oct 1, 2012 14:48 UTC (Mon) by TomH (subscriber, #56149) [Link]

That's not strictly true - while there are many libraries that don't use symbol versioning there are also many (other than glibc) which do.

To name a few: libstdc++, zlib, libpng, libjpeg-turbo, libxml2, etc, etc.