Re: [swarm-hackers] That CDPATH issue

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Bill Northcott wrote:
> I have no idea what that code was supposed to do, but I suspect it is 
> redundant.
> > SHLIBPATH_VAR=`./libtool --config | $SED -n 's/^shlibpath_var=\(.*\)/ 
> > \1/p'`

It is a way to determine which environment variables  (LD_LIBRARY_PATH, 
DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc.) are appropriate for telling the dynamic linker 
where to find needed shared libraries.   The javaswarm script gets 
extracted with these paths and the directive (as above), so that when it 
needs to load Swarm, Tcl, etc. from Java, those paths are known and evident.

Another way to do this is by embedding the path into the shared library 
itself.  

That can work fine on Linux, but on other systems like the Mac and HPUX, 
a way is to configure a containing environment with the right context.   
That's what the javaswarm script does. 

That being said, in the long run, the javaswarm script probably did more 
harm than good because it made it less obvious that Java/Swarm is 
nothing more than shared libraries and a jar file.   It was only 
intended as a convenience.