configure, if only newer version of the required lib available

Question

I'd like to ./configure a software, that requires:

• libboost1.35-dev
• libboost-filesystem1.35-dev
• libboost-thread1.35-dev

My distribution (Ubuntu 9.10) has only 1.40, and the configuration process fails with message:

libboost1.35-dev library is not installed.

Is it the expected behaviour or a bug? Is there a way to configure this program with v1.40 packages? Is it a good solution to break somehow the dependency checking?

Answer 1

There may be functionality differences between the libraries so I would make every effort to install the additional older libraries first(apt-file search libboost1.35). If that fails you can attempt to symlink the existing libboost libs to the older names and rebuild your ldcache and re-run ./configure.