xulrunner + dynamic linker run-time bindings

[Benoit Chesneau]

Binary package hint: xulrunner-1.9

Since xulrunner isn't installed in default path it can't be linked at runtime. I would suggest to add a xulrunner.conf file in /etc/ld.so.conf.d like this :

$ more /etc/ld.so.conf.d/xulrunner.conf
/usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.2.2
/usr/lib/xulrunner-devel-1.9.2.2

and running ldconfig at installl.

[Martin Pokorny (martin-truffulatree)]

I have also encountered this problem, and can confirm that the fix suggested by the bug submitter corrects the problem. However, I don't believe that it's necessary to include the /usr/lib/xulrunner-devel-1.9.2.2 directory in the xulrunner.conf file, since it contains no shared libraries (and those under the lib sub-directory are symlinked to /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.2.2).

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

Moving to xulrunner-1.9.2. I'll look into this, thank you for the suggestion.

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Thank you for your bug report. xulrunner is deliberately not installed in to the default search path, so it wouldn't make sense for us to do this change (we may as well just ship it in the default path if we wanted applications to link to it at runtime in the usual way)

[Randall Leeds (randall-leeds)]

Chris,
Could you elaborate a bit? Why is it the case for xulrunner that applications should not be able to link to it "in the usual way"?

[Benoit Chesneau (bchesneau)]

Chris,

Why it's deliberately not installed in the search path like other libs? It make distributions of application relying on xulrunner difficult on ubuntu.

Even you CouchDB package uses an ugly hack by changing search path when it start.SO please elaborrate.

[Randall Leeds (randall-leeds)]

The reasoning is apparently that xulrunner doesn't have a stable ABI and isn't versioned meaningfully. This is probably a complaint that should be taken up with Mozilla.

[Chad Miller (cmiller)]

I've heard, paraphrasing: The ABI of xulrunner is unstable, and the library is unversioned. We can't support installs and upgrades for the three or five years that we say we will.

[eventissimus (ivan-kostyuk)]

I played with CouchDB in Ubuntu 10.04. Later on, after the installation, configuring CouchDB, and first play, I did automatic update.
xulrunner was updated from /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.2.10 to /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.2.12
It impacted CouchDB too much (query functionality is not working).

This conf file should be created and updated on each package update; or conf file should be created and point to symlink, symlink to version should be created, and symlink should be updated on each package update.

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

This should only happen if you modified your system with this type of
symlink. If couchdb breaks on an upgrade and you did not modify
your system, please file a bug against couchdb.

On 11/19/2010 02:47 PM, eventissimus wrote:
> I played with CouchDB in Ubuntu 10.04. Later on, after the
installation, configuring CouchDB, and first play, I did automatic update.
> xulrunner was updated from /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.2.10 to
/usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.2.12
> It impacted CouchDB too much (query functionality is not working).
>
> This conf file should be created and updated on each package update; or
> conf file should be created and point to symlink, symlink to version
> should be created, and symlink should be updated on each package update.
>