[SciPy-dev] mlabwrap, alternative to LD_LIBRARY_PATH ?

[David Cournapeau]

Hi,

    I had some problems using mlabwrap on my workstation due to a stupid 
problem, and I think it can cause problems to other people too, so I 
report it here (I didn't see any way to report bugs to scikits yet ?).
    The problem:
        - to use mlabwrap, one needs setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the 
directory where libeng.so is located.
        - the directory containing libengine.so contains a lot of 
libraries, including a libz.so.
        - as LD_LIBRARY_PATH has precedence on system wide libraries, 
this means that when you launch python, it will use libz from matlab 
instead of the system wide libz, which is likely to cause problems (it 
caused me a headache because of unfound symbols when launching some 
python scripts).

    I don't know an easy solution to this problem: a workaround is to 
link the necessary libraries in another directory, and set this 
directory in LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Another one is to use rlink, but I don't 
know if distutils exposes this link option, and if it is available on 
all platforms anyway.

    Cheers,

    David