Dynamic linker “no version information available”

Question

When I copy over a program and a few libraries it needs to another machine I get the "no version information available" when I run LDD on the program.

I know why this is happening, I just want to know if its a big deal. Can I just ignore it? The program seems to execute and exhibits expected behavior. Could this come back to screw me in the future?

Answer 1

From the glibc sources for ldd

if (...) {
    /* The file has no symbol versioning.  I.e., the dependent
       object was linked against another version of this file.  We
       only print a message if verbose output is requested.  */
    ...
    errstring = make_string ("no version information available ...");
    ...
}

It means "version mismatch", including mismatch to null. No more, no less. Will it come back to screw you? The answer has to be, unfortunately: "possibly". It's possible that without the version it was looking for, it'll be buggy. And of course, it could be buggy even if it said everything was fine.

Should you worry? If this is a production system that large processes are depending on, copying over binaries from other systems is probably not a great idea. If this is just for you, or just to get things moving alongenough so you can work on the real problems, onwards and upwards.