Multilib Middle-Ground

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Denis Leroy wrote:
> Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>> Les Mikesell wrote:
>>> Paul Howarth wrote:
>>
>>>> Stripping of pathname-based and package-name based dependencies I 
>>>> can understand, but not the library deps.
>>>
>>> Are they the same across all RPM based systems?
>>
>> Yes, they are and the third party packages have no excuse if they are 
>> deliberately disabling the automatic dependency mechanisms.
> 
> It's not that simple. VMware does this for a simple reason: they want a 
> single RPM that works on *all* distros. Essentially it's like static 
> linking (except they don't, they just ship their own dependencies). 
> VMware would otherwise have fairly complex dependencies (gtkmm comes to 
> mind) that would force them to provide probably a different RPM for each 
> <distro,version> pair... There's simply no easy way to distribute 
> closed-source softare for Linux, as we all know.
> 
Isn't this the basic algorithm that's needed to solve the library 
dependency problem?

#!/usr/bin/python
import os
import sys

app = 'PROPRIETARY_APP'
missingLibs = []
if os.exists('/usr/lib64/%s' % app):
     libdir = '/usr/lib64/%s' % app
elif os.exists('/usr/lib/%s' % app):
     libdir = '/usr/lib/%s' % app
else:
     print 'Warning: Cannot find private app dir.'
     # Attempt to start the app.  The OS might provide all the necessary
     # libraries.
     sys.exit(os.system(app))

libToPrivateDir = {'libfoo.so.1': '%s/libfoo1' % libdir,
         'libbar.so.2': '%s/libbar2' % libdir}

for line in os.popen(['ldd', os.path.join('/usr/bin',app)]):
     tokens = line.split()
     if '=>' not in tokens:
         continue
     if ['not', 'found'] == tokens[-2:]:
         missingLibs.append(tokens[0])
path = [libToPrivateDir[lib] for lib in missingLibs]

current_path = os.environ('LD_LIBRARY_PATH')

if current_path:
     path.insert(0, current_path)

if path:
     os.environ['LD_LIBRARY_PATH'] = ':'.join(path)
sys.exit(os.system(app))