libX11 and Xau functions

Matthieu Herrb matthieu.herrb at laas.fr
Fri Apr 13 00:34:05 PDT 2007


Daniel Stone wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 13, 2007 at 08:03:19AM +0200, Matthieu Herrb wrote:
>> Matthieu Herrb wrote:
>>> In the old monolithic days, libX11 used to include a subset of libXau
>>> and libXdmcp, wich made it more or less self-contained.
>>> In the modularization process these parts where dropped (without
>>> changing the library's major revision). This is causing minor but
>>> annoying troubles with some legacy applications that don't use
>>> pkg-config to find out which libs to link to X applications.
>>>
>>> Was this change  intentional, or is it just an oversight that should be
>>> fixed?
>> No answer on that. Let me assume it's a bug then. Is it ok to add those
>> functions back to libX11 ?
> 
> Previously, these were linked statically (i.e. every copy of libX11.so
> had copies of libXau.a and libXdmcp.a embedded).  They're now linked
> dynamically:
> daniels at endtroducing:~/Desktop% ldd /usr/lib/libX11.so.6
>         libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXau.so.6 (0xb7e36000)
>         libXdmcp.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXdmcp.so.6 (0xb7e31000)
>         [...]
> 
> Is there a problem?

Yes it is a problem on 2 kinds of systems :

- those with static only libraries, they need to add libXau and libXdmcp
manually to each linker command line.

- some packaging systems, like the OpenBSD ports tree which keeps track
of all libraries dependencies for a given package: all packing lists
must be updated to take those 2 new dependencies. They don't handle this
completelyt automatically on purpose, in order to track these kinds of
ABI changes.


> 
> I'd obviously prefer if you didn't re-add them as static linkage, given
> that it would make security updates to libXau and libXdmcp very
> difficult to make.
> 

Ok then we'll handle it locally. I just wanted to make sure the change
was intentional, and not just something done this way because it was
easier to handle this way with the autotools.

BTW, there's an other issue with libXfont's FontTrans code on static
only architectures (the server part was moved out of libXfont, and this
causes linking issues in xfs because the common part of xtrans gets
defined twice now). I'll post more details later on this.
-- 
Matthieu Herrb
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