libtool wrapper scripts and LD_LIBRARY_PATH

[Claudio Saavedra]

Hi,

This was somewhat asked here [1] and perhaps earlier, but I'm not
entirely sure it has been fully addressed yet.

Premise is a library A that I have modified and installed in a non-
system prefix that is also installed in the system prefix. Now I have
some tests for another library B that depend on the changes I have made
in library A.

These tests for B are using libtool wrapper scripts, so that they can
run against the uninstalled changes of the library they belong to.
However, the wrapper scripts forcefully insert my system path to
LD_LIBRARY_PATH before my own LD_LIBRARY_PATH, which includes the non-
system prefix that I am using. Therefore, library A is loaded from the
system instead of my non-system prefix, unmodified.

The only way I have been able to work this around (without having to
install my changes to A in the system prefix or uninstall A altogether)
is to remove the system prefix from the generated wrapper script by
hand. That works as long as I don't regenerate the scripts, which
happens during distcheck, so this is not a good solution. I don't
really need the system prefix to be in LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and specially,
I don't need it to be included before the contents of my environment-
defined LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

I looked at build-aux/ltmain.in where the script template is. The
relevant excerpt is

    # Add our own library path to $shlibpath_var
    $shlibpath_var=\"$temp_rpath\$$shlibpath_var\"

So I'm guessing that this has something to do with the value of rpath,
but beyond that I have no idea. Both libraries use libtool and
autotools.

Thanks,

Claudio

ps. please keep me in cc as I'm not subscribed.

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libtool/2017-11/msg00001.html