Re: Shared library search paths

Oliver Elphick writes:

> As far as Debian is concerned, use of rpath is a bug. Here's a quote from
> some Debian system documentation:
>
> libtool automatically inserts `-rpath' settings when compiling your
> program.

I don't think so.

> But `-rpath' can cause big problems if the referenced
> libraries get updated. Therefore, no Debian package should use the
> `-rpath' option.

I'm not sure I buy that. All -rpath does is add a directory to the search
path that the program consults at runtime for its shared libraries. So
it's just an alternative in place of

hard-coded into dynamic linker
/etc/ld.so.conf
LD_LIBRARY_PATH

but it's the terminally accurate alternative.

What does happen if the referenced library gets updated? Nothing. -rpath
doesn't reference any libraries, it just suggests to the runtime linker
where it might look for one. I don't want to use it to find system
libraries, I just want psql to find libpq, and the right libpq, and I want
to relieve installers from having to fiddle around with these settings.

> libtool also refuses to link shared libraries against other shared
> libraries.

I don't think so.

--
Peter Eisentraut Sernanders väg 10:115
peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net 75262 Uppsala
http://yi.org/peter-e/ Sweden