When prelinking /usr/lib/liba2ps.so.1.0.0 from a2ps-4.13b-69.fc8 a warning is displayed: Prelinking /usr/lib/liba2ps.so.1.0.0 prelink: Warning: /usr/lib/liba2ps.so.1 has undefined non-weak symbols
'ldd -d' shows that this is because of 'program_name', but I can't work out how to fix this. It doesn't seem to be harmful.
Well, I agree that this is not fatal but see Jakub's comment in Bug 330821: This is not an error, just a warning. There are legitimate cases where having undefined symbols in ldd -d -r .../lib*so* is ok and one of them is if the library is not generally dlopenable, but relies on the binary to satisfy those symbols. On the other side, if the symbols are provided by some shared library, usually it is just an on unintentional omission on the packager's part, which is bad for multiple reasons: 1) if the symbols are versioned in the library where they are defined, the library with undefined non-weak symbols might use wrong versions of those symbols 2) in prelink it causes unnecessary prelink conflicts which need to be resolved at runtime 3) if you e.g. dlopen that library and don't know you need the other library as well, the dlopen will likely fail I'm reopening for reconsideration after providing this background info but I won't protest if you still feel like closing this one. Thanks.
program_name is indeed meant to be provided by the binary that links to liba2ps. error.c: 81 /* The calling program should define program_name and set it to the 82 name of the executing program. */ 83 extern char *program_name; Thanks for the background information.