Date:        Mon, 16 Aug 1999 01:50:27 -0400
    From:        Ken Hornstein <kenh@cmf.nrl.navy.mil>
    Message-ID:  <199908160550.BAA20271@ginger.cmf.nrl.navy.mil>

  | I have to agree with everything Brian has said.  I think that we're sorta
  | going backwards here without _some_ way of configuring library search
  | paths.

But of course, it is a religious argument, with people believing that
ldconfig is necessarily evil, they don't need it, and hence, no-one should
be given it.  It is essentially impossible to win an argument against that
kind of opposition, so it is probably best to just not bother.

  | HP/UX has a tool for changing the rpath of an already-linked executable.
  | It seems to me that this would be nearly ideal.

It would be quite useful, for the cases where you get an isolated binary
or two, that were compiled with different assumptions.

But where the issue is that you want to move a whole bunch of libraries
from one place to another (say you want to turn use of xpkgwedge on or
off - but not recompile the whole universe) racing around attempting to
first find, and then edit, all of the affected binaries, while possible,
can't really be called "ideal".   Nor is leaving large numbers of symlinks
around.

kre

ps: just in case the first paragraph (of mine) above wasn't sufficiently
clear - I believe that not having a system wide way to set library search
path defaults is ludicrous - and just as stupid as the SysV way of handling
TZ (where eevry application has to have it set, from somewhere, to be able
to discover the local timezone).