I am building tmux-2.0 from sources on a pretty regular Linux host. First attempt failed as it turned out that the version of libevent installed is older than required, so I proceeded to download and build libevent-2.0.22 from sources (current at the time of writing) first.
Building of libevent succeeded flawlessly, and I thought I could then retry building tmux with the following:
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$PATH_TO_MY_BUILT_LIBEVENT/lib/pkgconfig ./configure ...
The above invocation succeeded, so did subsequent make and make install.
Running my newly build tmux, however, aborts with a missing shared object, not surprisingly libevent-2.0.so.5:
tmux: error while loading shared libraries: libevent-2.0.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
I thought building against a custom library implies it will also be used at runtime? ldd on my tmux gives me:
linux-vdso.so.1 => (0x00007fff8f5ff000)
libutil.so.1 => /lib64/libutil.so.1 (0x0000003cf8800000)
libncurses.so.5 => /lib64/libncurses.so.5 (0x0000003cf7e00000)
libevent-2.0.so.5 => not found
librt.so.1 => /lib64/librt.so.1 (0x0000003ce8600000)
libresolv.so.2 => /lib64/libresolv.so.2 (0x0000003cea200000)
libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x0000003ce7600000)
libtinfo.so.5 => /lib64/libtinfo.so.5 (0x0000003cf7200000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib64/libdl.so.2 (0x0000003ce7e00000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib64/libpthread.so.0 (0x0000003ce8200000)
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x0000003ce7200000)
So, libevent-2.0.so.5 is not found.
Do I need to resort to setting, I don't know, LIBS, LDFLAGS or some other variables or switches to configure script above, so that, I don't know, the paths to my newly built libevent are embedded in tmux binary, courtesy of ld?
I do not have root access - university Linux workstation - and frankly I don't need one, I think. I also do not want to muck about with LD_LIBRARY_PATH or the like. Suffice to say, doing LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$PATH_TO_MY_LIBEVENT/lib tmux works fine. But I want it to work "by default", locating and using my libevent.
I guess the solution would apply to pretty much any software using the "GNU build system". What's the right thing to do here?
You built against a library, but the system doesn't know where the library is. Since you don't want to install the library, but rather leave it in the place where you built it, you could solve it with -rpath= option of the linker — it embeds a search path for libraries into the executable file.
Just rebuild your application with it being added to your LDFLAGS, like LDFLAGS="-rpath=/home/mypath/to/libevent" (but note, it is a linker option, and it is possible that in the makefile as a linker used the gcc itself — gcc does not know the option, then you need to write it likeLDFLAGS="-Wl,-rpath=/home/mypath/to/libevent" to force gcc to pass the option down to the actual linker)
By the way, actually you can change rpath even without recompiling the application — there's a tool patchelf for that job.