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From: randy@erik.UUCP (Randy Brown)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Sun shared libs - openwin vs MIT R4
Message-ID: <9105091641.AA16574@erik.uucp>
Date: 9 May 91 16:41:04 GMT
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 36


>    Sun, in their wisdom, forces OpenWindows users to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH
>    in order to find the shared libraries in /usr/openwin/lib, instead of
>    putting them somewhere normal, like /usr/lib for example

Actually, I'm glad they didn't.  Packages that essentially require
to be installed in specific places make integration difficult. Have you ever 
tried to run simultaneously (not switch between) two versions of package Foo,
that require essential (executable, configuration, header, temporary, lib) files
to be in /usr/foo?  To be fair, MIT X11R4 tries not to do this, but a lot of
available X source code insists on specific path names, and folks are still
working out how to use imake on general source trees when X isn`t in 
/usr/{bin,lib,include}/X11.

>    I have the MIT shared libraries somewhere else (doesn't really matter where).
>    I'm having trouble convincing my MIT binaries to ignore LD_LIBRARY_PATH,
>    and use the library paths that I gave them when I linked them. 

Maybe I'm missing something, but I use

   setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH /usr/5lib:/usr/lib:/usr/openwin/lib

and go on.  The binaries that came from Sun seem to find what they need, 
accepting the MIT libX11 just fine. The applications I link are untroubled by 
/usr/openwin/lib.  Am I naive?  I don't use a great many of Sun's applications--
mostly olwm and mailtool, others at times.

It is possible to use the env command to put environment wrappers around things 
if you want to give them the shared objects at run time that they used at link 
time, which sounds on the face of it like a good idea. Try

   alias mailtool env LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/openwin/lib:/usr/lib \
                                       /usr/openwin/bin/xview/mailtool \!\*

I'm not defending the way shared objects are found; I don't think it's too
good either.  But it doesn't really get in my way.