[geeks] broken software

[David Stipp]

On Fri, Dec 02, 2005 at 11:06:25AM -0500, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> We were talking about broken software recently...
> 
> I just found a nice little gem in Gnome.
> 
> The clock applet won't load.  Checking its library dependencies with ldd
> I was amazed to find it depends on Firefox, the WWW browser.
> 
> Huh?
> 
> % ldd /usr/libexec/clock-applet | wc -l
> 80

ldd -s will tell you more than you ever wanted to know.  The other libraries
are getting included by the base libraries. (the gnome lib and such requires
ssl, etc).  (ldd -s on Solaris, it's probably something different on other
platforms... try ldd -v)

   find object=libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0; required by vim

...

   find object=libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0; required by /usr/pkg/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.s
o.0
    search path=/usr/pkg/lib:/usr/openwin/lib  (RPATH from file /usr/pkg/lib/lib
gtk-x11-2.0.so.0)
    trying path=/usr/pkg/lib/libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0

etc, etc.

If you look around someone made a web page that graphs dependencies for ports
out of FreeBSD.  The gnome packages are a real mess.  (and kde too, but it's
nowhere near as bad.)

David

-- 
David Stipp <dstipp at coolhack.net>