HEADS-UP: New shared library versions coming soon

[Richard Todd]

Jeremie Le Hen <jeremie at le-hen.org> writes:
> I know that FreeBSD is still lacking a solution to remove old
> librairies, but I would like to know the actual recommended way
> to remove old libraries.  I'm not asking for a solution as NetBSD's
> /etc/postinstall, just a simple and neat one.  I can think of number
> of such solutions, like searching for libraries dating before the
> last world, parsing Makefiles from src/ to deduce which libs are
> obsolete, ldd on each binary ...  But I would like to hear what others
> do to achieve this.  In short, I'm looking for a neat solution.

libchk (/usr/ports/sysutils/libchk) is a nice Python script that automates the
"ldd on each binary" bit and gives you a list of .sos that aren't being used
by anything.  You do have to eyeball the list before doing a mass purge of any
unreferenced .sos, as there are some apps (Mozilla/Firefox is one IIRC) which
have .so files which are loaded by the program as needed but which don't show
up as fixed dependencies via ldd.  Still, the libchk list ought to at least 
give you a starting point.