modifying rpaths on executables

[Jeremy Sanders <jss at ast dot cam dot ac dot uk>]

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Hi

I think this question has come up some time in the past, but maybe the
situation has changed.

We've got a set of enormous packages, and each set of developers decided
to ship their own C++ libraries in their distributions, and modify the
LD_LIBRARY_PATH to add their own C++ library to the path. As you can
imagine this is a horrible mess with several packages like this. Of course
their provide the source for the packages, but their build systems are so
broken that it's virtually impossible to get the systems to build
yourself. One package requires you run make to ignore errors, and when
you do this it decides to go on an infinite loop.

One solution is to provide a wrapper script to mirror the packages bin
directory modifying the LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

The best solution would be to stick in an rpath into each executable to
avoid having to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Is there an obvious way in which to
do this? Would I have any hope in writing code to do this unless I have a
good understanding of the elf format?

Thanks

Jeremy

- -- 
Jeremy Sanders <jss@ast.cam.ac.uk>   http://www-xray.ast.cam.ac.uk/~jss/
X-Ray Group, Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, UK.
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