On Thu, Oct 25, 2007 at 01:05:15PM +0100, Martin MC Brown wrote: > I'm not sure I can answer that question - I don't every single application > currently being developed against MySQL :)
Oh, 'cmon! ;-) > I can tell you from experience here at MySQL that when we have mistakenly > during a build or release not included these libraries people complain. Okay, though that doesn't really answer the question. I was just wondering if you had a sense for how these libraries were linked, from the projects you had seen. >> If there's no technical reason for people to use archive libraries (and >> there almost certainly isn't) and we're not going to break application >> builds by removing them, then I'd much rather not ship them (as long as >> the shared libraries are easily generated). > > Well, I still don't understand why not. Are we somehow short of space or > limitations on file numbers? I thought we had a best practice about this, but I guess not. The issue is that if there are ever any problems discovered in these libraries applications linked against the shared copies can be fixed all at once, merely by replacing the shared library. If they're linked against archive libraries, they all have to be rebuilt, which may not always be possible, if source is not available, for instance. The space benefits -- sharing of text between running processes and simply having less stuff on disk -- are probably not interesting here. > They are part of the standard MySQL binary distribution and are built by > default from the sources - if you don't include then some people may well > think that the supplied installation of MySQL is either restricted or > incomplete. I don't doubt that, and I'd never suggest not shipping the libraries at all. I just would like to have a sense of whether the development experience would be diminshed if we shipped only shared libraries and not archive libraries. It sounds like we don't know, so it falls to the prject team to decide whether they want to do the experiment and find out who squawks, or be conservative and ship the archives. I'd recommend shipping shared libraries regardless, as the linker will pick them up preferentially. Danek
