[Ffmpeg-devel] Shared libraries install script broken in cvs

[The Wanderer]

Jacob Meuser wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 16, 2005 at 12:50:06AM -0500, The Wanderer wrote:
> 
>> Jacob Meuser wrote:

>>> I would prefer that the ldconfig lines be dropped and symlinks
>>> not be created at all.  really, people should know that they need
>>> to update the cache when they add libraries, and they should know
>>> how to do that on whatever OS they are using.
>> 
>> But, from the opposite perspective, why make them do it by hand? It
>> would be possible to extend the same logic to say that people
>> should copy the newly-compiled libraries into the 'installed'
>> locations themselves, yet it's certainly much more convenient to
>> have that done automatically; the same, I think, can be said about
>> the matter at hand. It is easily possible to argue that an
>> "install" command (such as 'make install') should do everything
>> which is obviously necessary to get the installed thing into a
>> workable state.
> 
> ok, I suppose I went a little too far with that, especially
> considering that if I don't want to run ldconfig, I can just do
> 
> $ make LDCONFIG=true install

Indeed. This doesn't remove the 'creates the symlinks automatically'
step, but it's still an easier way of avoiding the ldconfig step.

>> Not that the other points, about differing requirements among OS
>> variants and the unwieldiness of supporting all of them, are
>> necessarily invalid - but this particular notion is just bad
>> reasoning IMO.
> 
> maybe it should be noted somewhere that users who install as non-root
> into nonstandard library search paths can use LD_LIBRARY_PATH, or
> refer them to their system's ld.so docs?

That would probably be a good idea IMO. The question, obviously, is
where - the first place to spring to mind is the INSTALL file, but many
people (especially those who have compiled the program before) are
unlikely to stop to read that; would somewhere in 'configure --help' be
supportable, as the most likely to be noticed, or is that too intrusive?

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.