[OS X TeX] OT: getting library version

[Bruno Voisin]

The following is a question I posted somewhere else, in relation to i- 
Installer testing, but which I couldn't find answers to. Posting this  
here in last resort, in case some wizard would know:

> By the way, I've spent the last hour or so looking for how to get  
> the version number of a library (other than looking at the name and  
> trying to guess), without any success. For binaries you can try the - 
> v or --version options, but what about libraries?
>
> Some googling pointed to otool, and indeed a few time ago Jonathan  
> Kew posted the instruction "otool -L" to get a list of linked  
> libraries with version numbers, so I tried "otool -L /usr/local/bin/ 
> fontforge" hoping it would yield that info for libpng and  
> libfontconfig, to which fontforge is linked statically. It didn't  
> work and then I realized "otool -L" yields only dynamic library  
> info. I tried also stuff like "otool -fv /usr/X11/lib/ 
> libpng12.dylib" but couldn't make any sense out of the answer.
>
> All this because I was trying to get a picture of the libpngs in / 
> usr/X11 and /usr/local. I imagine Apple's 10.5.3 security update  
> places version 1.2.24 in /usr/X11 and i-Installer places version  
> 1.2.29 in /usr/local, and I was trying to double-check.
>
> All this high-fly command-line stuff, like "dscl . -list /Users  
> UniqueID" for a list of users, "dscl . -list /Groups PrimaryGroupID"  
> for a list of groups, or "hdiutil makehybrid -iso -o imagefilename  
> directoryname" for creation of an ISO disk image, it all feels like  
> magic. It's instructions posted once by a wizard on one of the TeX- 
> related lists, which I have carefully archived since, and which a  
> mere mortal could never find out by her/himself.
>
> Without knowing what to look for and where to look for, it's  
> impossible to guess. When you have the name of the instruction at  
> least it's possible to view the man page and hope you'll be able to  
> make sense of it. Every time I attempted to use the Xcode  
> documentation as a starting point for such info, i got lost in less  
> than 5 minutes.

Bruno Voisin