How to ignore LD_LIBRARY_PATH

[Eric Smith]

On 08/23/2011 11:44 AM, Orion Poplawski wrote:
> See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=719785 for the motivation
>
> The environment module system allows users to modify their environment in a
> predictable way, including setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH.  However, this makes it
> possible to break the modulecmd binary by putting an incompatible TCL (or
> other) library earlier in the path.  It would be great if modulecmd were made
> impervious to such things, but I don't know the best or acceptable method to
> do this.  I'm guessing using rpaths would be the easiest.
>
> Thoughts/suggestions?
>
IMNSHO disabling LD_LIBRARY_PATH is a bad thing. A user may need it for 
some reason that you don't anticipate. If someone uses LD_LIBRARY_PATH, 
it is up to them to make sure that they don't force incompatible 
libraries to be loaded.  If they report bugs against Fedora packages 
(including the environment module system) due to library 
incompatibilities when using LD_LIBRARY_PATH, I think the correct 
response is to tell them not to do that, and that it is not a bug in the 
package.

Generally the correct thing to do if an application is incompatible with 
the system-supplied Tcl is to rebuild that application. Granted, that's 
not possible with closed-source software like the Xilinx ISE referenced 
in that bug. However, I don't see it as a job of Fedora to fix problems 
in proprietary software.

As it happens, I actually use Xilinx ISE myself, and while I hadn't 
tried it with the environment module system, if I did do that and had 
trouble with it, and you told me that it wasn't supported, I would 
simply use it without the environment module system.

Eric