Re: normal ltdl linking suggestions?

[Andreas Jellinghaus]

On Monday 09 July 2007 22:54:34 Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> Your approach is outright heresy.  With this approach, users would
> simply install a copy of GNU 'autobuild' prior to building all other
> packages.  This would result in no need for embedded autoconf,
> automake, and libtool in all the packages.  Shame on you for
> suggesting such an approach.  Go stand in a corner.

when autoconf was created, it was the right design at that time:
people did not have to install some other dependency, but could simply
compile their software.

but times are changing and the new solutions on the block like scons and cmake 
are getting popular with many projects. those require you to install that 
dependency first, often even require some minimum version so you need to 
update sometimes your installed version. I'm sure the developers of those 
software packages valued the benefits of the new software against these 
hurdles and I could find much information that many regretted those moves.

by those standards I find requiring libltdl to be installed as shared library 
because of technical reasons that I mentioned, but you haven't even bothered 
to discuss, absolutely the right choice.

If you like to discuss those technical issues now, i'd be happy to hear more 
about the complexity of applications using libraries using libraries loading 
plugins using libraries using libraries loading plugins using libraries using 
libraries and what happends with duplicate symbols in this situation on all 
plattforms, possibly even those symbols being from different versions of a 
library and thus maybe incompatible. the only way I know to avoid problems is 
to require the library being a shared library, so that if it is used in 
several places the dynamic linker makes sure the same implementation is used,
and versioning magic in ld can work if needed.

Regards, Andreas