Re: Using -rpath on Linux

JV> [I am having an unproductive spell thesis wise. So I am unlurking for JV> a second.[1] ] JV> Martin Buchholz <martin(a)xemacs.org&gt; writes: JV> I agree this might be the only way to fix this problem. I just want to JV> point out something that was unclear from your summary of the JV> problem. The main reason that we were not using -rpath on linux as JV> opposed to say Solaris, is that on Linux -rpath takes precedence JV> always. You cannot override with things like LD_LIBRARY_PATH [2]. On JV> Solaris -rpath is more of a "place to search in last resort thing."[3] I've overlooked/forgotten that. I agree that it's bad that executable RPATH overrides LD_LIBRARY_PATH. On the other hand, because the executable refers to a specific soname, you can never get the wrong major version of a shared library, only the wrong minor version. And those are supposed to be binary compatible, so you typically only have one installed. And LD_LIBRARY_PATH is searched if executable RPATH is insufficient to find library dependencies. So the downside from LD_LIBRARY_PATH not overriding executable RPATH is pretty small. If you need to override RPATH for testing, you can use LD_PRELOAD for a specific library, or you can use the time-honored method of editing the binary and replacing RPATH with another (shorter) string. Also, ld-linux.so.2 claims the ability to ignore the RPATH in an executable, but I could not get that to work. Martin