Re: GDB honouring RPATH in binaries.

Kevin Buettner
2003-02-20T19:33:58Z

On Feb 20, 2:15pm, Kris Warkentin wrote:

> I've been having a debate with some coworkers about whether or not gdb
> should use the rpath in an elf binary to find shared libs if it has been
> set. The runtime loader checks LD_LIBRARY_PATH, RPATH and CS_LIBPATH in
> that order and the proposal was that gdb should do the same thing.
>
> The problem I have with this is in the remote case. This might make perfect
> sense on a self-hosted debugger but if targetting a remote machine, the
> RPATH might not make any logical mapping onto the host machine's filesystem.
> It might be possible to come up with some sort of heuristic using
> solib-absolute-prefix as a base but I don't think there's any reliable way
> to make use of this info if not self hosted.
>
> Any thoughts?

The other problem that I see is that the procedures used to resolve
the location of a dynamic library will vary depending upon the runtime
loader. E.g, on Linux, I am pretty sure that RPATH supercedes
LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

It may make sense to have a osabi dependent method for doing this
resolution. Or maybe this machinery should be tied to the solib
back end. (That way if you had a qnx back end, it would get used
automatically.)

With regard to the remote case, I would have thought that simply
prepending solib-absolute-prefix would give the correct results.

Kevin