#16 Rename the "rw" library to avoid shared library conflicts

[Michael Orlitzky]

Hello, I'm reporting a bug that we hit in Gentoo. Xpaint has a library, librw.so, that gets installed the system's global library location. Unfortunatelty, this conflicts with another program called simply "rw". Its homepage can be found here:

http://pholia.tdi.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de/~philipp/software/rw.shtml

The end result is that both xpaint and rw cannot be installed at the same time, and this is confusing to users since the two have nothing to do with one another.

I think the conflict would be easier to fix in xpaint, so I'm asking here: would it be possible to rename "librw" (which standa for read-write) library to something else like "libxpaintio"?

Making a change in xpaint will be easier than in the other project, because xpaint is an executable program and its users don't care what the underlying library is called (it won't matter if the name changes). The "rw" project, on the other hand, is meant to be used by other programs -- not to mention that "rw" is the whole project name. If they were to change their name, every program linking to that library would also need to be updated, and every distribution would need to rename its packages, and that's a lot more work.

For now (in Gentoo), we've simply blocked the two programs from being installed at once, but like I mentioned, that isn't the best solution. It's avoidable, and our users are going to complain =) So thank you for considering this.