der Mouse <mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA> writes:

> But I consider it catastrophically broken for a link to succeed and
> then executing the resulting binary, with no intevening changes such as
> library files disappearing, to fail for a reason that's wholly
> predictable at link time.  (It's fine to be able to cross-link and
> such, or to link for a system that has the .so files in other places.
> But that should be the unusual case.)

The way things work on Mac OS X (and I assume NeXTSTEP before it),
each dynamic library has an "install path" baked into it at link time;
when something is linked against the library, that path is copied into
the thing, so that when the thing is loaded it'll be able to find the
library it was linked against.  There are also search paths, both for
overriding that stored path and for providing a fallback if it fails,
configurable in the environment.

So, all a user of the library needs is -L/wherever/lib; the maker of
the library, though, has to pass an option (-install_path, I think) to
the linker for that to work.


-- 
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((lambda (r) ((C C) (lambda (s) (r (lambda l (apply (s s) l))))))  (lambda
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