>> There is no reason we couldn't have chosen to, for example, default
>> the -R path to be identical to the -L path if no run path is given.
> See http://www.science.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2/Q6.8.html

Those are reasons to do the defaulting more intelligently, not reasons
to avoid doing it at all.

For example, you might suppress this defaulting if LD_RUN_PATH is set.
You might omit relative paths, or warn if any are present, or some
such.

You certainly could, at the very least, warn if things are such that
immediately executing the resulting binary would fail for inability to
find some shared library.  (Naturally, there should be an option to
suppress the warning.)

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