[Xorg] shared vs static libraries

Roland Mainz roland.mainz at nrubsig.org
Wed Aug 11 07:58:34 PDT 2004


Jim Gettys 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.
> 
> 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.

We weren't thinking about shipping the two libs right now, only linking
the consumers in the X.org tree against it to avoid the pain of
symlinking the files around and undo that for the next release when the
API has become stable. I am not ready with testing the new version (and
found a very bad time to fall sick again) and Tanja isn't ready with the
manual pages either.

----

Bye,
Roland

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