Re: Still more problems on the way

[Detlev Zundel]

Hi Mark,

> Detlev Zundel <address@hidden> writes:
>> It is indeed, but nobody ran ldconfig after installation of the
>> libraries.  Doing that manually allows me to execute the hello world
>> example, hurray!  How should this have happened automatically?
>
> When you install pre-compiled libraries from a distribution's binary
> package, the package manager runs "ldconfig" automatically.  When you
> run "make install" from upstream source code, it is _your_
> responsibility to run "ldconfig".

Indeed.  Come to think of it, this step was usually triggered in an
unplanned way by correpsonding error messages after installation.
Obviously this manual triggering never formed a habit and in the absence
of clearly understadable error messages the whole arrangement breaks
down.

> You might ask why "make install" does not run "ldconfig" automatically.
>
> There are a few reasons.  First of all, non-root users must be able to
> run "make install".  In this case, they can't run "ldconfig", but there
> are other ways for programs to find their shared libraries, e.g. by the
> LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable (though this is slower), or by
> embedding an "rpath" into programs that use the library.
>
> More commonly, when modern distributions build their binary packages,
> they run "make install" as part of the build process (typically as a
> non-root user) installing into a temporary directory which is then
> archived to the binary package.  This would obviously be the wrong time
> to run "ldconfig".  Instead, it must be run when the binary package is
> installed, and this is handled by the package manager and not by "make
> install".

Thanks for the long explanation.

Cheers
  Detlev

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