On 9/14/05, Randy McMurchy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Tushar Teredesai wrote these words on 09/14/05 17:38 CDT:
> > Depends on whether the libraries installed by all these pacakges are
> > binary compatible.
>
> As far as I know, they are identical. The same code is used in
> all 3 packages.
>
>
> > Otherwise it could cause problems.
>
> What problems could it cause? I can't see any "problems" even if
> there were minor differences. If a package links to the library,
> and finds it, what problems could there be?
The problem with the nspr and nss libs is that they are not versioned
(i.e. no soname). So there is no way to know if there is an
incompatible API change. AFAIK, thunderbird and firefox branch of from
the trunk as per their suitablility. So it could well be that for a
given release of firefox and thunderbird, the nspr/nss code used by
both could be incompatible.
[Side Note: I have no idea whether the moz developers make
incompatible changes to the API for these libs, but that could be one
reason they don't have a switch to use the system installed nss libs.]
Hence it is best to keep the libraries in their package specific
directory i.e. /usr/lib/{mozilla,firefox,thunderbird}
>
>
> > This was one of
> > the major reasons I was looking at using system installed versions of
> > nspr and nss.
>
> Well, I don't that think is going to fly because of the fact
> that it won't be a required dependency. We can't make it a
> required dependency either, and that is the biggest issue.
Yep, but if we get it to work, it could be made a recommended
dependency :) Anyways, all that is way in the future.
> > Instead of including the commands for all packages, I would like to
> > suggest removing the moving of the libraries from the mozilla section.
> > For packages that depend on nss, there are two options:
> > (1) point them to <http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/>.
> > (2) Add a note to add the appropriate mozilla dir to the LDFLAGS.
>
> There are three options:
> (3) continue to use the tried and true versions that we are
> currently using.
Currently as per the book, external packages are only using the libs
included with mozilla. Firefox and Thunderbird are still using their
internal versions.
If instructions are added to all 3 packages to copy the libs to
/usr/lib, it could *potentially* cause problems. For example,
firefox-1.5 and thunderbird-1.5 each included nspr and nss libs that
are incompatible. A user installs firefox and moves the libs to
/usr/lib. Then the user installs thunderbird and moves the libs. Now
firefox will have problems with the installed nss libs.
The distros are doing the following (this is AFAIK, so I may be
mistaken so don't base any decisions on this):
* Gentoo is using approach (1), i.e. mozilla/thunderbird/firefox uses
their internal versions while any app that needs to link against nspr
or nss use a completely seperate version.
* Fedora installs nss libs from mozilla while firefox and thunderbird
use internal versions (basically as per the current book).
--
Tushar Teredesai
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/~tushar/
--
http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev
FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html
Unsubscribe: See the above information page
