Re: Google Summer of Code - some ideas

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

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2013 19:51:55 +0200
>> From: Aurélien Aptel <aurelien.aptel+emacs@gmail.com>
>> Cc: Emacs development discussions <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
>> 
>> I understand. My project could then be:
>> 
>> - add support for compiled modules
>> - rewrite libxml2 and libgnutls as modules
>
> libxml2 and GnuTLS are projects, not just libraries developed by Emacs
> in-house.  Rewriting them is probably a terrible waste of resources.
> Perhaps you meant to write some kind of wrapper for them (if that is
> needed, though I cannot see why).
>
> Why isn't dynamic loading the solution we want?

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.

I don't know if libffi or GObject Introspection provide a way to solve
this kind of problem, but if they do then that'd be way better, IMHO.

Please correct me if my guesses are wrong.

-- 
Jérémie Courrèges-Anglas
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