Re: Ian's solution [was: What hack in ld.so?]
Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 13:08:51 -0600
From: David Engel <dlengel@home.com>
I am the Debian and upstream maintainer of the libc5 ld.so. Ian's
patch will not be going in.
I think most people understand this, but I should make clear that it's
not my patch. I assume it's from Eric Troan. I found it in the
RedHat distribution.
FWIW, I cringed the first time I saw what RedHat had done. They did
not foresee the evils of -rpath and the problems it would cause in the
libc5/libc6 transition.
I can sympathize. I cringed the first time I saw how the dynamic
linker had been hacked to no longer do a straight path search. There
is some very ugly code in the binutils linker to deal with that.
I guess it's something of a standoff. Somebody made what I consider
to be an unfortunate decision a while back, with an incomplete hack to
the dynamic linker. Now that decision is repercussing out to other
software packages. I accepted the repurcussions into the binutils,
overriding my personal judgement. Alexandre doesn't want to accept
them into libtool, and I personally don't blame him.
Alexandre has said that he's willing to accept a patch to not generate
a -rpath argument for any directory listed in /etc/ld.so.conf. It's
possible to construct cases for which this will fail--because of the
dynamic linker hack, /etc/ld.so.conf is not synonymous with the list
of directories the dynamic linker will search--but there will probably
be fewer failure cases than the current situation. I encourage the
people who can't abide the current situation to write such a patch.
Let's not forget that this is only a temporary problem. Programs
built using the current libtool on a current Linux system will work on
all foreseeable future Linux systems, because nobody will ever have to
make this type of unfortunate decision again.
Ian
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