Re: [RFC] Add expat to the GDB sources

Christopher Faylor
2006-07-25T00:47:43Z

On Tue, Jul 25, 2006 at 12:29:28AM +0200, Mark Kettenis wrote:
>cgf wrote:
>>It sounds like you're advocating that every project which relies on
>>external libraries should include the source code for those libraries.
>>If that is the case, it means that we shouldn't bother with shared
>>libraries at all. Every package would, instead, be bloated by the
>>inclusion of its own version of expat, and openssl, and libtiff, etc.
>
>Shared libraries are hard. You can only do it right if you correctly
>implement a version policy, which is almost impossible to do if you
>don't have some sort of central control. It really is only worth
>doing if there are more than a handlful of different programs using
>the same library that are likely to be used simultaniously.

The only way I can make sense of the above paragraph is if you were
thinking that I wanted gdb to produce shared libraries. I'm not talking
about having gdb produce shared libraries for readline and expat. There
would be little point in doing that.

What I was saying was that if you carry the "no external dependencies"
to every other package on the system then there is very little need
for shared libraries since every package will have its own version
of the packages it needs.

So, shared libraries are not hard. You rely on the distro to do the
right thing just like you rely on the distro to produce a usable gcc.
Then the packages that come with the distro should use the shared
libraries rather than rolling their own version of the libraries.

cgf