I managed to get it to work. The problem was obscure. * the patch someone had come up with for putting the -rpath in libpari was faulty * I thought libgmp.so.16 was resolving (when I did ldd) because part of the procedure to put the -rpath in the library was to put the library path in LD_LIBRARY_PATH * I was running Julia itself from a different terminal, where LD_LIBRARY_PATH was not set.
So that problem is fixed. I can now initialise the Pari library from within __init__. Two issues remain: * the rpath was not needed in the library to run pari_init in the libpari library from outside __init__, only from inside (I checked this carefully). * putting const library name strings in deps/deps.jl is problematic because the working directory may be different depending on whether you are running the module test suite or just using the module from the Julia console. It would be nice to have a mechanism for including files from a given module with a constant string describing the location of the file to include, no matter what the current directory happens to be. As always, thanks for the help. Bill.
