Re: RFE: allow $ORIGIN in the run-path

[Alexandre Oliva]

On May 14, 2001, Laszlo PETER <address@hidden> wrote:

> I agree, things will go very wrong if your run-path does not match your
> actual directory structure. The nice solution would be to produce this
> string dynamically from $bindir and $libdir when using $ORIGIN.

This is very hard to do, in general.  Consider if bindir and libdir
are unrelated pathnames, and some of the pathname components are
soft-links.  Canonicalization of pathnames prior to computing the
actual relationship between the pathnames is an option, but it might
turn out to do the Wrong Thing (TM) if the user's aim is to keep some
of the soft-links reconfigurable.  There's no one-size-fits-all
solution for this problem.

And it gets worse: consider that libtool doesn't know, at
program-build-time, where a program is going to be installed.  It
can't even verify that the directory in which the dependence libraries
are going to be installed is accessible as some relative pathname from
the directory in which the program is going to be installed (remember
that not all programs are installed in $(bindir).

Perhaps we should introduce some flag that could be used at
program-link-time that would tell libtool where it was going to be
installed, and introduce a configure-option such as
--with-rpath-transform (akin to --program-transform-name) that a user
could use to get from $(libdir) to $ORIGIN/../lib.  The problem would
be how to get the information about the program's and the library's
installation directories into something unambiguous and usable for the
rpath-transform sed program to manipulate.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                  address@hidden, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        address@hidden, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist    *Please* write to mailing lists, not to me