Re: Why is "setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH very bad"?

[Howard Chu]

Mike Frysinger wrote:
> On Wednesday 24 October 2007, Tom Treadway wrote:
> > I've seen very frequent references to "LD_LIBRARY_PATH bad".
> > Is there a reference that summaries this badness?
>
> it largely depends on what you're trying to do.  must of the "it's bad dont do
> it" mantra is based around people shipping libraries and wrongly forcing the
> env var into the runtime environment instead of using proper rpath/ld.so.conf
> mechanisms.  using it for debugging an application is generally OK.
> -mike

One approach that works for packaged binaries is to embed rpaths that are 
padded out with excess NULs, and to provide a tool to rewrite those paths at 
install time. I suppose you could write a tool using libbfd to rewrite the 
binaries in a more portable/less kludgy manner.

--
  -- Howard Chu
  Chief Architect, Symas Corp.  http://www.symas.com
  Director, Highland Sun        http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
  Chief Architect, OpenLDAP     http://www.openldap.org/project/