[gmx-developers] Fwd: /usr/lib/libmd.so collision

[Mark Abraham]

On 30/05/2012 2:51 AM, Christoph Junghans wrote:
> Through my gentoo channel I got the following email.
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Richard Yao<ryao at gentoo.org>
> Date: 2012/5/27
> Subject: /usr/lib/libmd.so collision
> To: ottxor at gentoo.org
>
>
> I am currently porting the Message Digest library to Linux, but Gromacs
> currently uses /usr/lib/libmd.so for its molecular dynamics library,
> which conflicts.
>
> The Message Digest library is a system library on both FreeBSD and
> Solaris. The /usr/lib/libmd.so location is already used for it on those
> platforms and I believe it should also be used on Linux.
>
> I had a chat about this with alexxy and he told me to talk to you. Could
> Gromacs rename its libmd.so to libgromacs.so to avoid conflicts with the
> system libmd.so?
>
> ---------- End Forwarded message ----------
>
> I guess, he has a valid point. As the problem is solved for
> gromacs-5.0 already, the question is if we should also rename it in
> 4.6 (libmd ->  libgmxmd), so that gromacs has no library conflict on
> FreeBSD/Solaris.
>
> Any strong opinion against that? Otherwise I will prepare a patch and
> push it to gerrit.

Before the latest release, installing versions of CMake from source also 
had issues with this name clash. I got the CMake people to upgrade their 
bootstrap build to do more than detect the existence of libmd, and this 
has gone away. However our required CMake version is a whole major 
version behind this...

While I'm all for not making major changes shortly before releases, I 
don't see a major problem with changing the name now to whatever name we 
plan to use in 5.0. Two changes would be foolish, however.

Mark