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Re: What to do about some lintian errors/warnings?



Peter Mathiasson <peter@mathiasson.nu> writes:

> On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 03:59:39PM +0100, Michael Schuerig wrote:
>> Aha. What's the significance of this? And, if rpath is bad, why is it
>> there and used in the first place?
>
> It's not bad, it's good. But it's not needed for Policy compliant
> applications/libraries since their library dependencies needs to be
> installed in /lib or /usr/lib anyway.
>
> It's actually prohibted by policy, probably to make sure people don't
> add their build directories to the rpath.

More importantly, it keeps us from getting scrod if the ABI of
libraries in /usr/lib changes again.  This was a major problem during
the libc5->6 transition, since all of the infrastructure knew there
were two different places to look for libraries but you had binaries
with compiled-in rpaths that said "always look in /usr/lib first",
even though they were libc5 applications and /usr/lib had libc6
libraries.

(Yes, my first experience with Debian unstable involved opening up
/usr/X11R6/bin/fvwm2 in Emacs to remove the rpath...  :-)

-- 
David Maze         dmaze@debian.org      http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting.  Politicking should be illegal."
	-- Abra Mitchell



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