On Mon, Sep 21, 2009, Jeff Johnson wrote:
> On Sep 21, 2009, at 3:41 PM, Ralf S. Engelschall wrote:
>
>> No, not worth the effort as even in the days of GNU libtool it is an
>> endless effort when it comes to true cross-platform solutions like
>> OpenPKG. And beside faster updates in case of security issues (because
>> you don't have to rebuild the application) there is no real advantage
>> in practice. The disadvantages (portability issues) fully destroy the
>> advantages.
>
> What's the actual engineering issue with dynamic vs static?
> Is it just that there's too many flavors of dynamic linking?
> Just curious, not questioning at all.
The problem is that (1) building shared libraries is platform-specific,
(2) not all Unix platform support path stickyness (like "cc -Wl,-R") and
(3) OpenPKG is a multi-instance solution.
So, first, all packages which are not GNU libtool based would have
to be manually teached how to build shared libraries and second,
on some platforms we even might need program wrappers which set
the LD_LIBRARY_PATH accordingly (as we cannot import the while
OpenPKG <prefix>/lib into the global system library path as OpenPKG
supports multiple instances and hance there are multiple <prefix>/lib
directories).
And finally, the whole shared library business is not worth the effort
at all because the advantages (less disk space, faster updates and
sharing code segments in RAM) are either harmless (disk space and code
segments) or (in case of faster updates) are less then the disadvantages
(mentioned above).
Ralf S. Engelschall
r...@engelschall.com
www.engelschall.com
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