Re: Why does solib_open do what it does?

["Kris Warkentin" <kewarken at qnx dot com>]

Doh....I read the first email, made the changes and submitted the patch
before I saw this one.  Oh well, it won't hurt to have that in there for now
until we decide whether or not to prepend solib-absolute-prefix to paths.

I'm personnally of the opinion that there is MORE than enough search
capability there now.  If someone can't find a lib between what the loader
fills in, solib-search-path, solib-absolute-prefix AND target defined
searches.... I mean, how much hand-holding do we want to do?  The more you
broaden your seach, the more likely you are to get something you don't want.

cheers,

Kris

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kevin Buettner" <kevinb@redhat.com>
To: "Kris Warkentin" <kewarken@qnx.com>
Cc: "Daniel Jacobowitz" <drow@mvista.com>; "Gdb@Sources.Redhat.Com"
<gdb@sources.redhat.com>; "Michael Snyder" <msnyder@redhat.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2003 7:42 PM
Subject: Re: Why does solib_open do what it does?


> On Jun 19,  4:16pm, Kevin Buettner wrote:
>
> > It's still not clear to me if the PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH searches
> > are needed for natives.  Either they're not needed or nobody's noticed
> > that some previously available functionality (prior to Nov 21, 2000)
> > is now missing.  I do know, however, that we definitely don't want to
> > do these searches for (most) remote targets.  In light of Michael's
> > remarks, I'm now inclined to be more cautious about removing these
> > searches than I was originally.
> >
> > Further, if you're debugging a remote target, you'd better have
> > solib-absolute-prefix set, or things will almost certainly go wrong.
> > To the best of my knowledge, when you're debugging a native target,
> > you never set solib-absolute-prefix, so the fact that this is set or
> > not gives us a cheap, but effective way to determine whether the
> > intent is to run on a native target or not.
> >
> > Actually, it's better than that.  Something that I occassionally do is
> > to run against a "native" rda or gdb server where I don't set
> > solib-absolute-prefix.  Doing things in this fashion will make search
> > algorithm for this kind of "remote" (which is really a native
> > disguised as a remote) target identical to running a native and that
> > is precisely what's desired.
>
> I've just thought of another way to look at this which has nothing to
> do with inferences about which settings imply remote targets vs.
> which imply native targets.
>
> When you set solib-absolute-prefix, you want all absolute paths (aside
> from those constructed from solib-search-path) to be searched for
> using the given prefix.  Our present search code using PATH and
> LD_LIBRARY_PATH does not honor solib-absolute-prefix for absolute
> paths, so it makes (some) sense to disable these searches when
> solib-absolute-prefix is set.
>
> It would probably make more sense to force the PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH
> searches to honor solib-absolute-prefix, but before we go down that
> road, I'd like to reach some definite conclusion regarding whether
> these searches are really necessary.
>
> Kevin
>