check-rpaths on fedora-rpmdevtools: What's the purpose of it?

[Ville Skyttä]

On Thu, 2005-09-01 at 15:02 +0800, Didier Casse wrote:

>  "but what is  the REASON for this rpath removal policy? i'm curious
> to know why!
>  i'm wondering how it causes problems or breaks things or such... ? i'd really
>  like to know! :)"
> 
> I also have no idea about the internals and assume it's there for a
> reason. Ville provided me with some links and explanation but
> suggested that I email here to know more. Yes I want to know more and
> post it to the e-devel mailing list. Thanks for any insights.

Relevant bits of my above mentioned PM reply:

----

Here's something:
http://people.debian.org/~che/personal/rpath-considered-harmful
http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?RpathIssue

Mind you, the case of "standard library paths" in RPATH is the least
severe "error" detected by check-rpaths.  What's more useful in it in
general are the checks for RPATHS that might cause security problems
(empty RPATHs, buildroot remainders etc).  As far as I can tell,
standard paths like /usr/lib in RPATH are mainly of academic interest
and the cases where they'd bite are very rare in practice.  But if they
don't add any value whatsoever on our platform (and can at least
theoretically be harmful), why not just get rid of them?

For more information, see the contents of the check-rpaths and
check-rpaths-worker scripts.