On Fri, 16 May 2003, john heasley wrote:

> Fri, May 16, 2003 at 06:22:44PM -0500, Dave Uhring:
> >
> > SunOS (Solaris) requires that the libraries be linked with the
> > -R/usr/whatever/lib LDFLAG at compile time.  There is no automatic
> > LD_RUN_PATH installed in any user's environment, nor should there be;
> > same as NetBSD.
>
> i thought (may have bit rot) the sunos (ie: 4.1.2) linker added the
> the -L paths to the ELF headers.
>
> anyway, "nor should there be"...i agree it should not alter one's
> environment, but why not executable's headers?  according to ld.elf_so(1)

It was a design decision. The earliest systems to switch to ELF
(FreeBSD, linux) pretty much had to give the run-time linker a default
path, because no binaries would have had an embedded path. By the time
we switched to ELF, projects (including "libtool") generally supported
adding run-time paths, and every package was embedding run-time paths,
so we went for it.

Giving each executable its own path allows you to do nice things, like
you could have a suite with a library named "libwidget" in the suite's
directory, without having to worry about picking up somebody elses
widget library. You can even have multiple versions of a suite of
shared libraries installed at the same time, each in their own
directory, while all the executables can be in the path.

Frederick