Zig Version

0.14.0

Steps to Reproduce and Observed Behavior

Found while trying to package ncdu for Fedora

ncdu links against ncursesw which itself links to tinfo and because shared objects only embed the dependency name and not a full path it will attempt to find the library, which it won't succeed with[1].

the full chain of commands goes:

1. /usr/bin/zig build
2. /usr/bin/zig build-exe -D_DEFAULT_SOURCE -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=600 -lncursesw -ltinfo -lzstd -fno-strip -ODebug -Mroot=/home/sentry/git/ncdu/src/main.zig -lc --cache-dir /home/sentry/git/ncdu/.zig-cache --global-cache-dir /home/sentry/.cache/zig --name ncdu --zig-lib-dir /usr/lib/zig/ --listen=-
3. ld.lld --error-limit=0 -mllvm -float-abi=hard --entry _start -z stack-size=16777216 --image-base=16777216 --eh-frame-hdr -znow -m elf_x86_64 -o ncdu /home/sentry/.cache/zig/o/e6af199bb17435a138866251ed3ea3fd/crt1.o -dynamic-linker /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 ncdu.o --as-needed /lib64/libncursesw.so /lib64/libtinfo.so /lib64/libzstd.so /home/sentry/.cache/zig/o/31ee13b287dd6a347b524ffe90ce7ffc/libm.so.6 /home/sentry/.cache/zig/o/31ee13b287dd6a347b524ffe90ce7ffc/libc.so.6 /home/sentry/.cache/zig/o/31ee13b287dd6a347b524ffe90ce7ffc/libld.so.2 /home/sentry/.cache/zig/o/31ee13b287dd6a347b524ffe90ce7ffc/libresolv.so.2 /home/sentry/.cache/zig/o/e88f83e50bb73388bec0b5dfa5fa9721/libc_nonshared.a /home/sentry/.cache/zig/o/bb531447702b6bcd68ce0c01e22e5e5d/libcompiler_rt.a[2]

which then errors with > error: ld.lld: unable to find library -ltinfo

• removing /lib64/libtinfo.so does nothing
• adding -L /usr/lib64 makes it work
• removing /lib64/libncursesw.so outputs linker errors due to ncursesw missing, but the library error no longer appears

ldd output of ncursesw

$ ldd /lib64/libncursesw.so.6.5
        linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007fe59e1e7000)
        libtinfo.so.6 => /lib64/libtinfo.so.6 (0x00007fe59e13c000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x00007fe59df4a000)
        /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007fe59e1e9000

solutions:

• get all library paths from pkg-config
  • pkg-config omits system paths automatically but can be instructed to keep them
  • this would still break anything not using pkg-config
• add the library directories of all linked libraries

[1] Zig will add the libc installation path to the linker paths which is likely to be the normal lib dir masking this issue
[2] the previous command was ran with a stubbed cc binary otherwise it would be adding -L /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/15/../../../../lib64

Expected Behavior

zig just work