On Sat, Jan 29, 2005 at 09:45:44PM +0100, Mario Klebsch wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Hi! > > Am 29.01.2005 um 14:48 schrieb Hamish Moffatt: > >2. If an admin installs gEDA into /usr/geda(/lib,/bin,etc) they can > > add /usr/geda/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf. There is no need to use RPATH. > > If an admin snstalls geda, on a system, that already has geda > installed, e.g. geda-20030223 in /opt/geda-20030223, geda-20030901 in > /opt/geda-20030901 and now wants to install geda-20041228 into > /opt/geda-20041228, what in your opinion, shod this admin put into > /etc/ld.so.conf?
which is also a problem with setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH in your environment. Eventually you end up with a conflict. I've seen some software packaging systems which put a wrapper script around absolutely everything. Then each package is installed into a totally different --prefix (to use autoconf terms) and if LD_LIBRARY_PATH or any other environment variable needs setting it is done via the wrapper script. It makes having multiple installed versions work quite nicely. > You cannot assume only a single version of geda (or any other > non.system package) being installed on a system. indeed. I can't count the number of times when a new version was needed for some critical bug fix for one user but introduced a critical bug for some other. > >It is quite acceptable and > >common to have multiple versions of a library in /usr/lib. For example > >it is no problem to have /usr/lib/libgeda.so.20 and > >/usr/lib/libgeda.so.22. I have always cringed at the linux 'everything goes in /usr/bin and /usr/lib' approach... > >You haven't convinced me that RPATH solves any problem that is not > >solved by /etc/ld.so.conf (for admin-installed software) or > >LD_LIBRARY_PATH (for user-installed software). I'd like to note that "not all the world is linux"! As far as I know solaris does not have /etc/ld.so.conf and its annoying to have to always set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to find the X libraries. And I've not really seen that X on solaris is a rapidly moving target. Regardless of what various people think here though, rpath is an option. It is not forcibly excluded nor forced on anyone so hopefully that is sufficient to let different users administer their systems in the way which best suits their needs without a lot of extra work. -Dan --
