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 ______________________________________________________________________ OpenPKG http://openpkg.org User Communication List openpkg-users@openpkg.org