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Re: -rpath with libtool and Debian Linux



On Tue, 2 Feb 1999, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:

>    Date: Tue, 2 Feb 1999 22:27:15 -0600
>    From: John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>
> 
>    You're making the thing too specific.  The point is that libraries can
>    change; we're not the only ones that have done that (Linux isn't the only OS
>    that has done that either).  Forcing the paths to be in the executable when
>    they do not need to be should logically be thought of as bad due this this
>    possibility.
> 
> Actually, I'm curious as to whether there really is another example of
> an OS which changed shared libraries without changing the soname (as
> Alexandre pointed out, that was really what caused the problem).  I
> don't know of any example of that.

And, as we've pointed out, changing the soname is not a practicable
answer, until we have a cleverer automatic soname system.

Just look at the mess of libraries embeddeded in GNOME.

(Does symbol versioning fix this?  I don't know...)

Whilst I'm glad that we've come to some agreement that its not necessary
to use -rpath for system directories, for some appropriate definition of
system directories (which is a decision which, for Debian, can be made at
the distribution level, so we'll get it right), I am quite baffled that
you still think it's right to enable it as default...

I really don't see why it's clever to hardcode paths...  And I do see why
it's clever to have a dynamic library which goes looking for its libs, and
knows where to go...  This is in fact largely orthogonal to the
'incompatible lib without soname change' argument.

Jules

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