Good fix and good for sending them a merge request.
I still find it kinda baffling glibc would have this behavior for a trailing colon (:). Like, I know it's probably legacy/comparability, but it feels like a security nightmare. ./ should be explicit, not implicit.
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/whatever/lib${LD_LIBRARY_PATH:+:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH}
Pull request sent to https://github.com/torch/distro/pull/228.