The truth about net-im/ymessenger

[Kris Kennaway]

On Wed, Nov 22, 2006 at 08:06:29PM -0800, Eric P. Scott wrote:
> It's been deprecated under somewhat false pretenses.  :-)
> 
> The current port is set to IGNORE, claiming [it] "is a dynamically
> linked binary linked to old version of gtkhtml no longer in ports."
> 
> PR# 91491 alleged "The Yahoo! messenger port doesn't work on
> FreeBSD-4.11," and submitted what I consider a bad patch:
> deliberately breaking things for FreeBSD 4.x users by "upgrading"
> to a 5.x build, without providing appropriate conditionals for
> 4.x users.  That was a mistake...
> 
> It turns out that on a FreeBSD 4.11 machine, updated to
> 4.11-SECURITY, with the latest ports and packages installed, the
> "old" ymessenger port (20020902) is still "good."  There's just a
> small "gotcha."

4.11 is deprecated and soon to have all support terminated, so this
isn't all that relevant moving forward.  The issue is that it doesn't
run on anything that is more modern than 4.x.

> It seems, somewhere along the line, a couple of shared libraries
> were renamed.  This typically merits a fairly inconspicuous
> mention in /usr/ports/UPDATING, instructing users to relink
> everything affected.  Of course, that's not exactly helpful
> advice when you're dealing with a binary port.  It turns out a
> simple libmap.conf file is all it took to bring a "dead" FreeBSD
> 4.5(?) executable back to life:
> 
> # /etc/libmap.conf
> #
> # candidate		mapping
> #
> 
> [/usr/local/libexec/ymessenger/ymessenger.bin]
> libgdk12.so.2		libgdk-12.so.2
> libglib12.so.3		libglib-12.so.3
> libgmodule12.so.3	libgmodule-12.so.3
> libgtk12.so.2		libgtk-12.so.2

This is not enough; since it is a 4.x binary it is linked against 4.x
versions of those libraries, and if you try and run the binary on a
modern version of FreeBSD then it will fail, since those libraries are
incompatible with their 4.x analogues.

Kris
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