RPATH for installed binaries ?

[Harri Porten]

On Sun, 19 Feb 2006, David Faure wrote:

> Let's make sure we're talking about KDE here, and now about "rpath in
> binaries or shared libs in general."

Where's the difference? KDE is just yet another set of libraries and
binaries.

> If users install "equally versioned shared objects in multiple paths", like two versions
> of kdelibs 3.x in different paths, how can they actually use those two versions of
> kdelibs, if not by setting KDEDIR(s) to point to the one they want to use?
> And if they have to set KDEDIR, don't they have to set PATH and
> LD_LIBRARY_PATH as well?

I do mix different installations of Qt and KDE (system vs. my own) in
parallel (from the same shell) on a daily basis. Granted, through
different versions of e.g. ksyscoca mixing can sometimes be problematic.

If Trolltech would have sticked to their LD_LIBRARY_PATH usage from one of
the 4.0 pre-releases my life (as a developer) would have already become
quite inconvenient:

  http://lists.trolltech.com/qt4-preview-feedback/2005-04/msg00629.html

> (Maybe we could provide a script that encapsulates it all...
> kde-set-prefix <prefix>.)

Not sure I like those states in the shell. People become really creative
in writing little shell scripts that try to be intelligent with setting up
the environment. My university was a complex script framework that
required users to issue commands like "module remove kde1; module add
kde2" which would set up the proper environment variables. May sound
convenient at first, but became a hell to maintain and use in light of
cross-dependencies.

Instead, I prefer to simply have /opt/mykde/bin/kapp do what specified to
do: run kapp. Setting PATH to include the preferred paths is surely
preferred for the general case but should remain nothing but a convience.

Harri.