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Re: Shared library defines a RPATH



On Sun, Jul 28, 2002 at 03:21:46PM -0400, James A. Treacy wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 28, 2002 at 02:12:01PM -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> > The problem is: rpath looks like the standard, simple answer to
> > the problem, while it actually has a lot of side-effects that are
> > not really desirable (and not obvious, either).
> 
> Could you elaborate on the side effects? Every time rpath comes up
> the discussion is not very productive. It would be nice to have a
> place where the pros and cons (and future solutions) are listed so
> the discussion can start from some place rational.

I'm still convinced that it is fine to use rpath in the following
case:

 - The lib referenced with rpath is in the same package as the
   binaries that make use of it.
 - No other binaries in any other package reference the library. 
   (Maybe exception if the other package is closely tied to the first
   and depends on exactly a particular version.)
 - The lib is not intended to be used by anyone else. There's no -dev
   package for it, it is just a convenience lib to avoid that lots of
   related binaries contain the same code.

Let's look at the disadvantages I've heard about so far:

 - "rpath breaks cross-compilation": It doesn't, at least not
   inherently. You just need to pay more attention to get things
   right. rpath will certainly prevent "out of the box" cross-builds
   of some programs, *but* projects that use automake should be fine.

 - "You can't substitute different versions of the lib, e.g. debugging
   versions." True, but not a problem with the scenario I outlined
   above.

 - "rpath breaks filesystem moves." Well, this is not a problem with
   my scenario, since everything is in the same package. I'm not
   denying that it's a huge problem with "normal" shared libs.

 - "rpath breaks major lib upgrades such as the libc5 -> libc6". True,
   but again, I'm only talking about a "convenience library"...

So I don't see any reason not to use rpath for things such as the ogle
packages.

Cheers,

  Richard

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