libraries and the build system

tridge at samba.org tridge at samba.org
Wed Nov 17 12:53:42 GMT 2004


Jelmer,

Please don't go crazy with shared library features. There are many
cool things that can be done with shared libs, but they come at a
cost.

The costs include:

  - managing shared lib versioning. This is a _major_ pain. We would
    need someone to take responsibility long term for shared library
    versioning of Samba libs. That will be a lot of work.

  - installation pain. I really hate the shell script gymnastics that
    libtool goes through to avoid the nasties of library copy/install
    on some platforms.

  - portability. every system seems to have their own way of doing
    everything.

I am not against the possibility of _optionally_ supporting shared
libs, but I would be most certainly against making them the default
without very careful consideration.

Note that the recent build changes have already broken the build on
several systems. We need to get those systems back and working again,
and not break more.

Cheers, Tridge


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