Testing a dlopened library

[Roger Ferrer Ibáñez]

Hi,

I'm writing an application that generates both an executable and a 
library that acts like a plugin, so sometimes is "dlopened" at runtime.

The problem arises when checking the application by means of 'make 
check'. If the application has not been installed yet, the dlopened 
library is not found (because it still resides somewhere in a given .lib 
subdirectory of one builddir) and the test fails.

If the application has been installed, the installed library is dlopened 
instead, so it is not actually checking the library just built but the 
one previously installed.

This problem renders things like 'make distcheck' almost useless because 
this test fails, since 'make install' is performed later than 'make 
check' in automake's distcheck.

I assume that this is the expected behaviour: dlopened shared objects 
are not properly found until installed, isn't it? So, I wonder, how is 
this issue workarounded? Are testsuites modified so LD_LIBRARY_PATH is 
updated to include the proper .lib directory?

Thanks a lot,

--
Roger Ferrer Ibáñez - address@hidden