On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 11:42:28AM +0100, Floris Bruynooghe wrote: > Now when using the --rpath option to the build_ext command > distutils.unixcompiler.UnixCCompiler.runtime_library_dir_option() will > use some heuristics to figure out which option to pass to compiler to > get the runpath in (i.e. "-R" or "-Wl,-R" etc). I'm going to argue > that this needs to be extened pass in -Wl,--enable-new-dtags,-R if the > GNU linker is used so that the newer and better RUNPATH gets put into > the shared objects all the time. (I don't yet know how to detect the > GNU linker but would like a consensus on the desired behaviour before > looking into this).
The patch for this is attached to http://bugs.python.org/issue5900 Feel free to give feedback/criticism if you care about this. > The second issue with build_ext --rpath is on AIX. Again some > background on AIX shared objects, AIX is not SysV-like and uses the > XCOFF binary format instead of ELF. Therefore they don't have a RPATH > or RUNPATH, but they do have a think called LIBPATH which does > something similar. The difference between XCOFF's LIBPATH and ELF's > RUNPATH is that AIX's runtime linker does not have a default search > path, hence the full search path needs to be encoded into the LIBPATH > of the shared object. > > Now I would propose for build_ext --rpath to encode the LIBPATH when > used on AIX since that is the correct thing to do IMHO. I was kind of hoping someone would pick up on this and at least argue about how it is not a good thing to try and convert an option for one concept (RPATH/RUNPATH) onto another one that isn't quite the same (LIBPATH). The side-effects are just not as clearly defined and open to interpretation. Anyway, having given this some more tought I now think it's not a good thing. Instead I'm going to make a patch that raises and exception if the --rpath option is used on AIX as it's behaviour is undefined[0]. If a user does want -blibpath:/some/path to be passed on to the linker they can still use LDFLAGS. Other opinions would be appreciated. Regards Floris [0] The linker will actually simply ignore it lurring the user into false security. Only when -bsvr4 is passed to the linker too will it be treated identical as -blibpath, but this is again the same fuzzy mapping as a SysV user will not be used to passing in the default search path to -R/--rpath and hence probably not end up with what they wanted too. -- Debian GNU/Linux -- The Power of Freedom www.debian.org | www.gnu.org | www.kernel.org _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
