Dynamic loading of C libraries

Dynamic loading of C libraries

[Richard Stallman]

I talked with our lawyer, and we determined that GCC's technique of
checking for a symbol whose name says "I am under a GPL3-compatible
license" is ok for Emacs and other GNU packages when dynamically
loading libraries at the C level.

So you can implement dynamic loading with the check for that symbol.
If the symbol is not present then the function to load should
report an error and not load it.

Re: Dynamic loading of C libraries

[joakim]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> I talked with our lawyer, and we determined that GCC's technique of
> checking for a symbol whose name says "I am under a GPL3-compatible
> license" is ok for Emacs and other GNU packages when dynamically
> loading libraries at the C level.
>
> So you can implement dynamic loading with the check for that symbol.
> If the symbol is not present then the function to load should
> report an error and not load it.

Super news!


-- 
Joakim Verona

Re: Dynamic loading of C libraries

[Stefan Monnier]

> I talked with our lawyer, and we determined that GCC's technique of
> checking for a symbol whose name says "I am under a GPL3-compatible
> license" is ok for Emacs and other GNU packages when dynamically
> loading libraries at the C level.
> So you can implement dynamic loading with the check for that symbol.
> If the symbol is not present then the function to load should
> report an error and not load it.

That's great news.  So all we need now is for someone to submit a patch
that provides such dynamic loading functionality, and then start
using it.


        Stefan

Re: Dynamic loading of C libraries

[Leo]

On 2010-05-22 01:15 +0100, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>> I talked with our lawyer, and we determined that GCC's technique of
>> checking for a symbol whose name says "I am under a GPL3-compatible
>> license" is ok for Emacs and other GNU packages when dynamically
>> loading libraries at the C level.
>> So you can implement dynamic loading with the check for that symbol.
>> If the symbol is not present then the function to load should
>> report an error and not load it.
>
> That's great news.  So all we need now is for someone to submit a patch
> that provides such dynamic loading functionality, and then start
> using it.

Isn't the patch already around
http://www.loveshack.ukfsn.org/emacs/dynamic-loading/?

>
>
>         Stefan