How To Upgrade the Libraries without Trashing the System

How To Upgrade the Libraries without Trashing the System

Warning

Note: You should always have a rescue disk set ready when you perform
this procedure, in the likely event that something goes wrong!

This procedure is especially difficult if you're upgrading very old
libraries like libc4. But you should be able to keep libc4 on the same
system with libc5 libraries for the programs that still need them. The
same holds true for upgrading from libc5 to the newer-yet glibc2
libraries.

The problem with upgrading dynamic libraries is that, the moment you
remove the old libraries, the utilities that you need to upgrade to
the new version of the libraries don't work. There are ways around
around this. One is to temporarily place a spare copy of the run time
libraries, which are in /lib/, in /usr/lib/, or /usr/local/lib/, or
another directory that is listed in the /etc/ld.so.conf file.

For example, when upgrading libc5 libraries, the files in /lib/ might
look something like:

libc.so.5
libc.so.5.4.33
libm.so.5
libm.so.5.0.9

These are the C libraries and the math libraries. Copy them to another
directory that is listed in /etc/ld.so.conf, like /usr/lib/:

$ cp -df /lib/libc.so.5* /usr/lib/
$ cp -df /lib/libm.so.5* /usr/lib/
$ ldconfig

Be sure to run ldconfig to upgrade the library configuration.

The files libc.so.5 and libm.so.5 are symbolic links to the actual
library files. When you upgrade, the new links will not be created if
the old links are still there, unless you use the -f flag with cp. The
-d flag to cp will copy the symbolic link itself, and not the file it
points to.

If you need to overwrite the link to the library directly, use the -f
flag with ln.

For example, to copy new libraries over the old ones, try this. Make a
symbolic link to the new libraries first, then copy both the libraries
and the links to /lib/, with the following commands.

$ ln -sf ./libm.so.5.0.48 libm.so.5
$ ln -sf ./libc.so.5.0.48 libc.so.5
$ cp -df libm.so.5* /lib
$ cp -df libc.so.5* /lib

Again, remember to run ldconfig after you copy the libraries.

If you are satisfied that everything is working correctly, you can
remove the temporary copies of the old libraries from /usr/lib/ or
wherever you copied them.


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