On Mon, 14 Jan 2002, Peter Seebach wrote:
> >ld.so.conf already has support for that. Alternately, you could add the
> >appropriate paths to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable.
>
> Right.  My question is, should we maybe put these in the *default* ld.so.conf,
> since it is almost always useful, and almost never even inconvenient, to have
> these paths searched.  If this change were made, I don't think it would ever
> work against me.

If I remember correctly, NetBSD/i386 1.4 shipped with these paths in
ld.so.conf. With the introduction of ELF and rpath, these options were
depreciated but support was left for backwords compatibility reasons.

Here's one big problem with having these paths in ld.so.conf:

 I have the following files:

  /usr/pkg/lib/libfoo.so
  /usr/X11R6/lib/libfoo.so

 I have two applications, 'PackageManager' and 'GtkSushi'. The former
 requires the first library, and the latter requires the X11R6 one. If we
 have these paths in ld.so.conf, both will use the same ("first match")
 and one of them will lose.

Repeat after me: Mmmmm, rpath :^)

Jared