[plug] library paths, Debian

[James Devenish]

In message <5.1.0.14.2.20030704145744.025c61f0 at cyllene.uwa.edu.au>
on Fri, Jul 04, 2003 at 03:35:57PM +0800, Denis Brown wrote:
> General questions: what sets up the library paths for an
> application/library and where is that magic smoke located?

The essential ones:

man 8 ld.so
man 8 ldconfig

(But I've read below, so I know you know about these.)

> Okay, dselect'd [1] zlib1g-dev, but it seemed to flash up messages that it 
> was adding other packages as well - dependencies most likely.

Hmm.

> Before that, though, given that I have references to the libraries
> (readline, etc) in /etc/ld.so.conf and I have ldconfig'd, why would
> the PG configure not have been happy?

Ideas:

(1) "Missing library" implies that something is being compiled and
linked as part of its creation, or you have a pre-compiled binary that
is linking as part of its runtime. Either way, `man 1 ldd` and also see
what Craig wrote about this a couple of days ago (look in archive for
"Moving an older app).

(2) A lot of free software makes assumptions about the operating system
(i.e. that it's the same as the developer's). So, if the problem was
during compilation, then you may just have a bad ./configure file.

(3) Is a volume mounted with 'noexec' mount option or something else
that's odd. (Though if it was, you'd probably get a lot more errors than
this! :)

(4) You have some shell variable set by accident (e.g. pre-existing
errors in PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, or whatnot).