On Wed, 24 Oct 2007, Tom Treadway wrote:
Hi, I've seen very frequent references to "LD_LIBRARY_PATH bad". Is there a reference that summaries this badness?
LD_LIBRARY_PATH is not always bad. It has valid uses and is useful in controlled situations. Imposing management of LD_LIBRARY_PATH on the user of your software is evil. However, if you provide a wrapper script which hides this detail from the user then it is much less evil.
In times past I have observed a very evil problem with LD_LIBRARY_PATH in which the user required several different 3rd party applications, each of which used a somewhat different version of the same shared library. Applications would end up using the wrong shared library and either fail due to a missing symbol, or crash. Once again, providing a shell script wrapper which sets up LD_LIBRARY_PATH for only your application helps considerably to avoid such conflicts.
Bob ====================================== Bob Friesenhahn [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ _______________________________________________ http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/libtool
