[Pkg-openmpi-maintainers] Building with rpath disabled

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 8 January 2009 at 16:45, Manuel Prinz wrote:
| Hi,
| 
| attached you'll find a (trivial) patch against the latest svn trunk
| (r20227) that adds a --disable-rpath to configure, so libraries can be
| build with rpath disabled. The reason for adding this feature that was
| that rpath is often problematic and it is removed in Debian anyway. (We
| currently delete rpath entries after building which is a little ugly.)

"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practive, they are not."  It
is true that Debian 'at large' has a policy to not use rpath. This is due to
the fact that as a distro, we can control ld.so.conf etc. 

That said, I as a developer often do not nuke rpath because certain systems
are simply built to use it. With Open MPi, and particularly Rmpi, I have had
nasty bugs given that symbols are split over several libraries. To be honest,
that was worse with Ubuntu because they globally tell the linker to
strip-unneeded (or something like that) as a default which killed till I
enforced LD_FLAGS="" to override it for the package.

Long story short, I'd suggest a short moratorium here til we at Debian have
figured that all ducks are indeed in a row.  Right now I fear they may not
be.  Testing standalone C programs against libmpi is not enough of a test.

Manuel and I will toy with this off-line and report back.
 
Dirk

PS  Apologies also for the 'ftbfs' lingo the other day which came from a
Debian-internal list and a post that was not initially meant for wider
distribution. 

| The patch simply adds a call to the macro AC_LIB_RPATH in configure.ac
| and installs "config.rpath" from gettext which seems to be the preferred
| way of distributing the m4 macros needed for that. The license should
| not be an issue, as far as I can say.
| 
| I tested it with the current trunk and it worked fine for me. It would
| be great if you could consider including it since it makes Debian
| maintainance of Open MPI a little easier and I think other distributions
| (and some users) may benefit from stripping rpath as well.
| 
| Thanks in advance!
| 
| Best regards
| Manuel
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