[525] in Release_7.7_team
Conclusions about X links in /usr/lib
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Tue May 7 13:04:33 1996
Date: Tue, 7 May 1996 13:04:10 -0400
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@MIT.EDU, sol24@MIT.EDU
Upon investigation, I discovered that:
* The Solaris dynamic linker is less intelligent than I
suspected. If it can't find anything in the directories
specified by LD_LIBRARY_PATH or the binary's run-time path
(as specified by a -R option to the linker), it checks
/usr/ccs/lib and /usr/lib and then gives up.
(The systems I was familiar with have a linker cache or a
configuration file which let you specifoy additional default
directories for all binaries.)
* As of Solaris 2.4, the imake templates shipped by Sun would
generate executables that don't run. Executables would be
linked with -L/usr/openwin/lib (causing them to link against
the shared libraries) but not with -R/usr/openwin/lib, so
they wouldn't have a runtime path allowing them to find the
shared libraries. The binaries in /usr/openwin/lib do have
a runtime path, so they clearly weren't built with the
shipped templates.
This is fixed in Solaris 2.5 (the imake templatesf specify
/usr/openwin/lib), but that doesn't help us deal with the
binaries already out there, or the binaries that will be
built under Solaris 2.4.
* /usr/openwin/bin/openwin, the script for starting the X
server in the Open Windows environment, does an "export
LD_LIBRARY_PATH" but doesn't actually set any linker
variables, suggesting that at some point they relied on
LD_LIBRARY_PATH to find X libraries but don't any more. Not
terribly relevant.
* Because we had the symlinks in /usr/lib in the 7.7 release,
there are (presumably) a lot of binaries out there that
work right now, and would break if the symlinks were taken
away.
(A better solution for the 7.7 release would have been to
set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in the global environment, but I wasn't
working here at the time.)
So we have to leave the symlinks in there for now. The only way I can
conceive of getting rid of them is to hope that a future release of
Solaris has a more configurable dynamic linker. It doesn't look like
2.6 helps any.
