>2) Get rid at least partially of our static linking mess and ship
>some of our internal libraries as shared but private.
>See below for an example.
Not that I've done much of anything recently to warrant my opinion being
considered (: but IMHO this is a Bad Idea, for precisely this reason:
>The key bonus of our current model is that is pointless to ship on the system
>dirs librararies that noone else uses. There is little or no advantage in
>having, say,
>/usr/lib/libtc.so.1
>since only the tc* stuff will use it.
On the other hand, regarding this:
>On the other hand, since more than on program use such library, there is room
>for having it shared.
This sounds like a classic case of a solution looking for a problem.
We're no longer in the '70s days of 1MB hard disks or even the '80s days
of 1MB system RAM; storage space has grown far faster than program size,
and on modern systems, the relative savings of using shared libraries is
rarely worth the additional filesystem clutter. Looking at my current
install of transcode, the entire installation (with docs) takes up only
20MB, which is more than reasonable, and any additional load time taken
up by loading multiple copies of the libraries is insignificant compared
to actual processing time under ordinary usage.
To be perfectly honest, I'm rather skeptical of this entire fascination
with shared libraries (not speaking specifically of your suggestion,
more of the general slant of modern developers). It feels like a
mixture of old habits dying hard and attempts to optimize non-critical
paths, neither of which is a beneficial use of developer time. That's
not to say there are no use cases for shared libraries, since there's
e.g. certainly a security benefit to being able to upgrade a single
shared libc to fix a security bug rather than every program on the
system; but of course that argument doesn't apply to things like the
transcode libraries, which are used only by a single package.
You do say:
>Having the libtc* stuff shared and the tc* programs link to them
>will save a fair number of headaches and annoyances (at least to me).
Out of curiosity, what annoyances have you had with them? I've never
run into any trouble.
--Andrew Church
achu...@achurch.org
http://achurch.org/
