[Ecls-list] rpath issues

[Peter Adolphs]

Hi!

Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll wrote:
> After pondering several alternatives, I
> have decided to drop all uses of --rpath in all versions of ECL.

Yes, I also think it's better not to enforce the use of rpath since quite a few
people seem to reject it (its use is discouraged in Debian, for instance).

> Since ECL now supports standard Unix/Linux paths (i.e. /usr/lib,
> /usr/local/lib, etc), this should pose no problem in regular
> installations. Other Unix users will have to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to
> include the directory where libecl.so resides.

I don't think that /usr/local/lib is standard lib path on all Linux systems. At
least in my Ubuntu 6.06 chroot environment, /usr/local/lib/libecl.so wasn't
found by the dynamic loader. So setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH (or adding
/usr/local/lib to ld.so.conf if that lib path should be available in general)
will be indispensible for a default ecl installation with plain ./configure &&
make && sudo make install on those systems, otherwise all users not having that
knowledge of how dynamic libraries are found will have the impression that the
package is now broken.

You could also let the user choose. The macros in lib-link.m4 (from the havelib
module in gnulib), for example, add rpath linker flags if the library to be
linked is in a non-standard lib directory but also offer an option
`--disable-rpath'.

Cheers

Peter