[Rd] 2 versions of same library loaded

[Ross Boylan]

Can anyone help me understand how I got 2 versions of the same library
loaded, how to prevent it, and what the consequences are?  Running under
Debian GNU/Linux squeeze.

lsof and /proc/xxx/map both show 2 copies of several libraries loaded:
/home/ross/install/lib/libmpi.so.1.3.0
/home/ross/install/lib/libopen-pal.so.6.1.0
/home/ross/install/lib/libopen-rte.so.7.0.0
/home/ross/Rlib-3.0.1/Rmpi/libs/Rmpi.so
/usr/lib/openmpi/lib/libmpi.so.0.0.2
/usr/lib/openmpi/lib/libopen-pal.so.0.0.0
/usr/lib/openmpi/lib/libopen-rte.so.0.0.0
/usr/lib/R/lib/libR.so


The system has the old version of MPI installed under /usr/lib.  I built
a personal, newer copy in my directory, and then rebuilt Rmpi (an R
package) against it.  ldd on the personal Rmpi.so and libmpi.so shows
all references to mpi libraries on personal paths.

R was installed from a debian package, and presumably compiled without
having MPI around.  Before running I set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to
~/install/lib, and then stuffed the same path at the start of
LD_LIBRARY_PATH using Sys.setenv in my profile because R seems to
prepend some libraries to that path when it starts (I'm curious about
that too).  I also prepended ~/install/bin to my path, though I'm not
sure that's relevant.

Does R use ld.so or some other mechanism for loading libraries?

Can I assume the highest version number of a library will be preferred?
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-devel/R-exts.html#index-Dynamic-loading says "If a shared object/DLL is loaded more than once the most recent version is used."  I'm not sure if "most recent" means the one loaded most recently by the program (I don't know which that is) or "highest version number."

Why is /usr/lib/openmpi being looked at in the first place?

How can I stop the madness?  Some folks on the openmpi list have
indicated I need to rebuild R, telling it where my MPI is, but that
seems an awfully big hammer for the problem.

Thanks.
Ross Boylan