Re: Google Summer of Code - some ideas

[jca+emacs@wxcvbn.org (Jérémie Courrèges-Anglas)]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: jca+emacs@wxcvbn.org (Jérémie Courrèges-Anglas)
>> Cc: Aurélien Aptel <aurelien.aptel+emacs@gmail.com>,
>>         monnier@iro.umontreal.ca, emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2013 22:16:17 +0200
>> 
>> I'm probably not knowledgeable enough about this subject, but... is it
>> really easier to get this (raw dlopening) right?  If my Emacs build
>> dlopens gnutls with a major 39, and a few days later my system gets
>> a 40th gnutls major version because of ABI change, then I will run into
>> problems.  And I can't count on my package tools dependancy system to
>> notice the ABI change, unless I artificially encode the dependancy on
>> gnutls or take care to bump my Emacs package to force a rebuild.
>> 
>> Perhaps are there workarounds or methods to implement this safely in
>> Emacs, but I fear that it would make life harder for some users and
>> packagers.
>
> Emacs already has a solution for all this, in the MS-Windows build
> (which already loads these libraries dynamically).  So what's needed
> is to use the same arrangement on other platforms, which currently
> link statically against these libraries.

I think you meant "link dynamically", not "statically".

> In  nutshell, the version against which Emacs was compiled is recorded
> at build time, and then tested against the library at load time.

I trust you that there must have good reasons to do this on "windows",
but I fail to see the bonus on Unix-like distros out there that have
proper package / library / dependancies management.  Startup time?  Not
failing at startup if a shared lib that we linked against isn't present
anymore?

I'm a bit late at this discussion, so please forgive me if this has
already been discussed.

Aurélien: I trimmed you from the CC list since gmail doesn't seem to
like my ipvsh^Wipv6 prefix...
-- 
Jérémie Courrèges-Anglas
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