# PSA for Julia system package builders

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/psa-for-julia-system-package-builders/7827>\
**Category:** Tooling\
**Created:** [December 18, 2017, 4:44am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/psa-for-julia-system-package-builders/7827 "2017-12-18T04:44:37Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![jameson](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/jameson/32/23_2.png) [@jameson](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/jameson)\
**Post date:** [December 18, 2017, 4:44am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/psa-for-julia-system-package-builders/7827/1 "2017-12-18T04:44:37Z")

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A note to individuals maintaining a system package for Julia:

I’ve closed issue [#6742](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/6742) “Do not rely on unversioned .so files” by creating a new `libwhich` tool for creating explicit links to shared libraries that may be dlopen’d by Julia. This is intended to make your jobs easier, by automatically creating soft links to the SONAME-versioned `.so` file in a private `usr/lib/julia` folder (instead of doing it at runtime by parsing the result of `ldconfig`). And thereby also (hopefully) making your auto-deps detection scripts work better (since libraries that Julia will dlopen get explicitly listed as soft link files in the rpath during the build process).

Since this isn’t much used by a simple `make` (e.g. it’s specifically for you, and not typically visible to users doing a source build) let me know if you have any issues with it, or encounter any ways to make it better.