[SciPy-dev] mlabwrap, alternative to LD_LIBRARY_PATH ?

[Alexander Schmolck]

David Cournapeau <david@ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> writes:

> 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.

Yeah, the whole LD_LIBRARY_PATH thing is a huge pain -- there ought to be a
better way to do this, but it's the "official" one:

<http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/index.html?/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/matlab_external/f39903.html>

Any unix build experts who can comment on this?

cheers,

'as