Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 13:08:51 -0600 From: David Engel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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