Question

Here’s the current situation I’m in:

I want to distribute a binary app on Linux that would run on several distros (not all of them, just the main ones matter at the moment, let’s focus on Ubuntu and Fedora for the sake of this discussion). The app in question links to libbz2 for some of its work. A simple “Hello World” will illustrate the situation :

/* main.cpp */
#include <iostream>

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
  std::cout << "Hello World!\n";
  return 0;
}

The app is built as such :

g++ -lbz2 -o test.bin main.cpp

My build system is on Ubuntu. When I perform a check with ldd on the resulting binary, it lists libbz2.so.1.0 as a runtime dependency. When I take this app to a Fedora machine, the app doesn’t run and ldd reveals that it can’t find libbz2.so.1.0. Fedora only has libbz2.so.1 and libbz2.so.1.0.4, but not libbz2.so.1.0.

Red Hat’s Bugzilla database reveals that this behavior is not a bug, but a feature. I don’t really need libbz2.so.1.0, and I would be satisfied with simply linking to libbz2.so.1, but I have yet to figure out how.

I have seen a similar question asked here previously, but the accepted answer (You can pass the actual .so file instead of -l on the linker command line) doesn’t seem to work. I tried building with the following command :

g++ /lib/libbz2.so.1 -o test.bin main.cpp

However, ldd still mentions that the app depends on libbz2.so.1.0, even though I passed the full name to g++.

Now, the question is, is there a way on Ubuntu to build the app to have it depend only on libbz2.so.1 rather than on libbz2.so.1.0?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Why don’t you just link statically instead?

I have done that in the past for builds on Ubuntu and deployment on RHEL which works just fine using static builds.