Re: How-to solve runpath-errors when splitting packages?

[Timothy Sample <samplet@ngyro.com>]

Hi Hartmut,

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Hi Hartmut,
>
> Hartmut Goebel <h.goebel@crazy-compilers.com> skribis:
>
>> I already managed to split the output into several. Here is an the
>> file-list for zbar:qt:
>>
>> /gnu/store/…-zbar-0.22-gtk/bin/zbarcam-gtk
>> /gnu/store/…-zbar-0.22-gtk/lib/libzbargtk.so.0.0.2
>> /gnu/store/…-zbar-0.22-gtk/lib/libzbargtk.a
>> /gnu/store/…-zbar-0.22-gtk/lib/libzbargtk.la
>> /gnu/store/…-zbar-0.22-gtk/include/zbar/zbargtk.h
>> /gnu/store/…-zbar-0.22-gtk/lib/pkgconfig/zbar-gtk.pc
>>
>> Obviously zbarcam-gtk should use libzbargtk.so from the same output.
>>
>> How can I make zbarcam-gtk find the lib? Any ideas?
>
> Normally, the build system (QMake I suppose?) should take care of it.
>
> In GNU configure parlance, if you do:
>
>   ./configure --libdir=/some/thing/lib
>
> then the build system will ensure that executables, once installed, have
> /some/thing/lib in their RUNPATH.
>
> IOW, instead of adding a post-install phase that moves files around,
> make sure to pass the right libdir option to QMake or whatever.

I learned a bit about this when splitting up some GNOME packages.  There
is a general problem.  Many GNOME packages don’t split things along
“libdir”/“bindir” lines, but rather core library, GUI library, and GUI
binary.  I had little luck with usual configure script flags.  It was
much easier and more reliable to patch the “*.in” files of the various
subpackages.  For an example, see “libgoa”.  The only funny thing there
is that I had to set “--libdir” back to its usual output, because we
automatically set it when an output is called “lib”.  If the output had
a different name, it wouldn’t be necessary to reset “--libdir”.

I checked what Nix does for packages with the same problem, and it looks
like they tend to move stuff after it has been installed, and then use
“patchelf” to fix up the paths.  My instinct says that this is a little
bit more brittle, but I suppose our runpath validation would keep
everything on course.

Hope that helps!


-- Tim