[libvirt PATCH v2 1/1] meson: Drop RPATH usage

[Pavel Hrdina]

On Wed, Aug 19, 2020 at 01:22:58PM +0200, Pavel Hrdina wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 19, 2020 at 12:47:40PM +0200, Andrea Bolognani wrote:
> > Right now we're unconditionally adding RPATH information to the
> > installed binaries and libraries, but that's not always desired.
> > 
> > Debian explicitly passes --disable-rpath to configure, and while
> > I haven't been able to find the same option in the spec file for
> > either Fedora or RHEL, by running
> > 
> >   $ readelf -d /usr/bin/virsh | grep PATH
> > 
> > I can see that the information is not present, so I assume they
> > also strip it somehow.
> > 
> > Both Debian and Fedora have wiki pages encouraging packagers to
> > avoid setting RPATH:
> > 
> >   https://wiki.debian.org/RpathIssue
> >   https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RPath_Packaging_Draft
> > 
> > Given the above, it looks like it's actually better to not go
> > out of our way to include that information in the first place.
> 
> I need to look into this because I remember adding the rpath there as
> a result that something was not working correctly but now I don't
> remember what was it. Originally I did not have it there.
> 
> Pavel

So I managed to remember what was the issue. If you run install libvirt
into custom directory like this:

    meson build --prefix /my/custom/dir
    ninja -C build install

and after that running:

    /my/custom/dir/bin/virsh

will fail with:

    /lib64/libvirt.so.0: version `LIBVIRT_PRIVATE_6.7.0' not found (required by ./bin/bin/virsh)

This is what autotools did by default as well and I did not know that
there is an option --disable-rpath as it's not in output of
`./configure --help`.

If we don't care about the use case of installing libvirt into custom
prefix and breaking it it should be OK to remove this from meson but my
guess is that we should not do it.

We can add an option like it was proposed in V1 but with the following
changes. In meson.build we would have this:

    if get_option('rpath')
      libvirt_rpath = libdir
    else
      libvirt_rpath = ''
    endif

and all places with install_rpath would use libvirt_rpath instead of
libdir directly and we would not have to have the craze if-else.

Pavel
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