At 22:12 Uhr -0700 30.05.2002, Torrey T. Lyons wrote: >I noticed at SourceForge that Fink has announced the availability of >KDE for Mac OS X. First I should congratulate all the hard working >KDE-Darwin and Fink developers! > >My concern is that I noticed that Fink has started to distribute >libXv and libXinerama as dynamic shared libraries in its unstable >version of XFree86. In fact, these libraries are required for KDE >according to the documentation. This is a Bad Idea(TM). These >libraries are not distributed shared on any platform(*) and it can >cause a highly undesirable divergence for application developers or >porters to start linking to them (and then relying on them) as >shared libraries. Currently the Darwin version of XFree86 follows >exactly with other platforms in its X11 libraries and we should not >move away from this. > >In any case, libraries that are not distributed as shared libraries >are distributed this way for a reason. In the case of libXinerama it >is distributed only static for backwards compatibility. For libXv, >the maintainer has strong feelings that it should not be distributed >shared because it the API is not stable enough. It has changed many >times with different XFree86 distributions and a shared library >presumes the API is more or less stable. > >My understanding is that the KDE-Darwin porters have had troubles >configuring things to work without libXinerama and libXv as shared >libraries. Making them shared libraries as a short term hack is one >thing. However, we should make sure that we solve the underlying >configuration problem before people starting building apps using >these shared libraries that will ever afterwards rely on them being >present. > >--Torrey > >(*) It is true that one version of Red Hat did include a shared >version of libXv. The Red Hat maintainer of XFree86 has since >apologized, but it does leave them in a tricky situation.
Torrey, I am fully with you on this. I stated similar concerns about this in the past but was overruled. In any case now it's not to late to undo this, if we can agree on it, even with relatively little pain. However, first we need to evaluate in how far shared libs of this are required for the correct working of KDE, and if they are required, why so, and what we can do to make KDE happy with static libs of them. One of those more directly involved into the KDE porting (Benjamin, etc.) should comment on this. Cheers, Max -- ----------------------------------------------- Max Horn Software Developer email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> phone: (+49) 6151-494890 _______________________________________________________________ Don't miss the 2002 Sprint PCS Application Developer's Conference August 25-28 in Las Vegas -- http://devcon.sprintpcs.com/adp/index.cfm _______________________________________________ Fink-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
