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Re: /X11R6/lib needs fixing



Hi,

an older mail which didn't get through my mail (mis)configuration
before I left for a while...

On Sun, Jul 01, 2001 at 10:47:37PM +0200, Robert Bihlmeyer wrote:
> All shared libraries in /X11R6/lib are broken as-shipped. The dynamic
> loader simply can't find them until told by setting up of
> LD_LIBRARY_PATH. This won't work for s[ug]id programs.
> 
> A couple of possible solutions come to mind:
> 
> (a) Wait for the successor of rpath, and use that
> (b) Declare that /X11R6 is old cruft, and "ln -s / /X11R6"
> (c) Declare that /X11R6 is old cruft, and stop using it for good
> 
> It seems that (a) has been the hope for now, but I can't see that
> coming sometime this decade.

Actually I believe support for RUNPATH is coming along nicely, but I don't
really know.  I think some support for it is in binutils.

> (b) semi-works with all the fun
> repercussions we've already encountered with /usr (I just fixed
> dpkg-shlibdeps again ...)

dpkg-shlibdeps is the only repercussion I know of right now.  There have been
two /foo is symlink to /usr/foo incarnations (ae and cpio), which were easy
to fix.

> I prefer (c).

I concur.

> /usr/X11R6 is already deprecated in Debian policy for
> all but the X window system itself. A closer look at the archive
> reveals that only 16 source packages (one of them xfree86) put
> some library into /usr/X11R6/lib! Fixing those few we care about
> shouldn't take too long. Branden could possibly be persuaded to
> special-case hurd-i386, so the X libraries themselves (by far the most
> important of all these) land in (/usr)/lib.

It would be nice to know how much in the packaging really depends on this.
It should be possible to just have a global variable as a Debian prefix.

The Hurd configuration file gnu.cf can easily be changed to specify a default
prefix of /.  The packaging scripts might require some more work, not to forget
the package scripts (postinst etc).

Don't forget to include the symlink for /X11R6 anyway, for legacy support.
It might be sufficient to have the symlink to get the packaging scripts working
in a transitional period, so that changing the gnu.cf file and setting the
symlink is a quick fix.

> I'd be glad to hear alternative proposals, but I definitely think that
> this needs some consensus in the near future.

Your proposals are good, all three will work.  b) is the least expensive
solution, c) is nice, too, and a) is what we planned for.  If you want to go
for c), it would be greaet if you could prepare appropriate patches for the
Debian package.  Doing this on the Hurd is a bit difficult (I just went through
the process of building X, which required a seperate partition for debian/),
but you can actually do all the development under Linux, and building for linux
etc.  The issues are exactly the same (except that you use linux.cf instead
gnu.cf, and that you are casing for linux instead for gnu).

Thanks,
Marcus



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