Comment 5 for bug 542506

> why? This doesn't seem to be the case in debian.

not sure why debian thinks they can maintain this. Mozilla explicitly wants the option to break ABI even in security updates, so when that happens we are screwed. Hence ubuntu doesnt make a top level library out of it.

Mozilla even refused to agree on a small/stable subset API ... so there is no way to do what debian does without calling for troubles.

> so we need to invent a shell wrapper for gxine that sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH
> or compile gxine with rpath because of what reason again?

yes. use /usr/lib/xulrunner-`xulrunner-1.9.2 --gre-version` to get the right LD_LIBRARY_PATH; dont use rpath because of the various reasons - one the one from above - we intentionally don't ship a stable directory name in minor updates.

so yes, LD_LIBRARY_PATH basically causes the same, but at least i warned folks because they dont know how to do that without talking to me. So doing this is at maintainers risk. Basically, for main, you should be willing to swiflty fix your code to support new ABI if we need to roll out such a security update. For universe the same, though I try to not think about it ;)