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Answer 1

+2 A:

1) Stuff directly in /usr belongs to your distribution and should not be modified except via its package manager. Stuff in /usr/local belongs to the local installation, and is for you to manage as you see fit. Thus, it is correct to put a local installation of a newer libICU in /usr/local/lib.

2) You can do this by adjusting some settings when you build ICU - I can't give you specific advice because I don't know what build harness ICU uses. However, you should not do this, because that will overwrite the distribution's files, which can cause arbitrarily horrible breakage.

3) Sort of. The problem is not that the library was installed in the wrong place, but that /usr/local/lib isn't in the default search path. You can fix this two ways:

temporarily for yourself with this shell command:
```
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib
```
permanently for all users, by adding /usr/local/lib to the list in /etc/ld.so.conf and then running ldconfig as root.

Zack 2010-09-13 17:15:19

3) the adjusted LD_LIBRARY_PATH will still not make it visible for e.g. autoconf. For that add the path to the LDFLAGS: ./configure LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib.

honk 2010-09-13 17:18:11

honk: good point, I forgot that bit.

Zack 2010-09-13 17:35:19

Adding the LD_LIBRARY_PATH got the samples to run properly, thank you. However when I try to compile my program (which was working on the previous version of ICU), I get errors like this during linking. undefined reference to `icu_44::Calendar::getNow()

Travis 2010-09-13 18:20:51

Please post the output of `nm -o --dynamic /usr/local/lib/libicu*.so | grep getNow`.

Zack 2010-09-13 18:44:08

# nm -o --dynamic /usr/local/lib/libicu*.so | grep getNow/usr/local/lib/libicui18n.so:000c48a0 T _ZN6icu_448Calendar6getNowEv/usr/local/lib/libicui18n.so:000c0940 T ucal_getNow_44/usr/local/lib/libicutu.so: U ucal_getNow_44

Travis 2010-09-13 19:07:18

`T _ZN6icu_448Calendar6getNowEv` means that `icu_44::Calendar::getNow()` is indeed exported by your new library. Did you have `-licui18n` on your link line?

Zack 2010-09-13 19:53:28

Yeah it is. But what takes -licui18n and maps it to the location of the library? The version of the library that came with my distro is still in /usr/lib so could -licui18n be pointing to that instead of the 4.4. version I installed into /usr/local/lib?

Travis 2010-09-13 21:10:42

Quite possible. Try adding `-L/usr/local/lib` to the link line (before the `-licui18n`). That's what honk was talking about way above.

Zack 2010-09-13 22:42:03

Answer 2

A:

/usr/local is the directory hierarchy for locally installed software. /usr/bin, /usr/lib/, etc. are for system managed files (i.e. the ones managed by your distributions tools like rpm yum dselect etc.)
You shouldn't install things into /usr/lib generally
You may need to run ldconfig (as root) to update the library cache that maps names (like libicui18n.so.44) to path names (like /usr/local/lib/libicui18n.so.44)

Another wrinkle is that if you have an x86_64 system, the correct library path for 64 bit libraries is /usr/local/lib64 not /usr/local/lib. In this case add --libdir=/usr/local/lib64 to the ./configure command line when building ICU.

Geoff Reedy 2010-09-13 17:18:32

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