30 Jun 2007 (Sat)

14:09:41 # Life lib64 on amd64. On debian amd64, there is /usr/lib64 directory which is symlinked to /usr/lib. It's useful since many upstream expect /usr/lib64 to exist, and changing every single upstream isn't possible. However, there is one problem. Many libraries explicitly specify /usr/lib64, and that goes into libtool .la files and will generate a -rpath of /usr/lib64. libtool will ignore a set of pre-defined paths from -rpath, which is defined as sys_lib_dlsearch_path_spec, which is probably pulled from /etc/ld.so.conf on linux systems. The problem is, /usr/lib64 is a symlink to /usr/lib, and it is not included in library search path (although effectively, /usr/lib is included in the search path, so libraries in /usr/lib64 is searched). I am suspecting that this results in many -rpath set for /usr/lib64 on amd64 system. I think this is currently solved by running chrpath in debian/rules, but not all of them is fixed. Another way to fix it would be to patch libtool to ignore lib64. Hmm..