[Xorg] shared vs static libraries

Jim Gettys Jim.Gettys at hp.com
Wed Aug 11 07:37:20 PDT 2004


And recent experience showed us that making a library static
reduced our options greatly in compatibility.
                           
This caused great anguish with the changes to xinerama; we couldn't
update apps to use a new protocol version.

So shipping static libraries only makes things worse, not
better.
                         - Jim

 
On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 03:42, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> Roland Mainz wrote:
> > No, that's not possible. We would have to gurantee backwards
> > compatibility to the old version (at least the commercial Unices may
> > require that), either via lots of #ifdef in the code or via storing the
> > old code in a seperate dir. The mess with libXaw6 vs. libXaw7 is a good
> > example of this nightmare.
> 
> This commercial Unix vendor no longer ships any static libraries.  If it's
> not stable enough yet, we just won't ship it, shared or static.




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