RPATH for installed binaries ?

[Harri Porten]

On Fri, 17 Feb 2006, David Faure wrote:

> All this to save setting one env var, when the user needs to set a few
> anyway if installing KDE into a custom prefix? (PATH, KDEDIRS, maybe
> even KDEHOME, XDG_DATA_DIRS, XDG_CONFIG_DIRS......). Too much trouble
> for so little gain.

I have to bring up the argument "if everyone (every developer) would think
that way our systems would be a mess!".

> The utopia of "it works out of the box", which was the idea of using RPATH,
> is clearly an utopia; a custom prefix does not work out of the box anyway.

I admit I don't get the "custom prefix" part. But my argument pro RPATH
(or other technologies*) is the convenience for the average user. Some of
the arguments you mentioned are specific to developers.

Harri.

* Our company's product - like Open Office and other software - uses thin
wrapper binaries that set environment variables (like LD_LIBRARY_PATH;)
for the real binary. This (plus some careful coding that avoids hardcoded
absolute paths) makes the whole package fully locatable and even
accessible over network drives. For the hundreds of KDE binaries that
might be a bit overkill though.