[Spread-users] Shared Libraries

[Joshua Goodall]

On most modern OS's, I would be very surprised indeed if the shared
lib forms worked at all differently to a statically linked binary.
There is a tiny overhead involved.

I have had system maintenance issues from static libs; that is, I
feel I have to recompile every dependent binary (and bear in mind
that most sysadmins don't have time to subscribe to the CVS logs
of every package they install in order to know better). This is an
even greater problem in a fine-grained dependency tree (e.g. the
Debian GNU/Linux project).

Conversely, statically linked binaries are definitely more reliable
and easier to comfortably sign-off for in production usage. So
having both is a comfort. I think I will test sometime this week.

J

On Tue, Mar 05, 2002 at 04:31:55PM -0500, Jonathan Stanton wrote:
> I can say that we havn't tested it almost at all (which is why it is hidden
> in the makefile and not documented :-))
> 
> The model up to now has been to only support static libraries, but newer
> daemons could be dropped in and old apps compiled against old libraries
> would work just fine. Since very little functionality (or bugs) are in the
> libraries, most apps wouldn't need to link in newer libraries anyway, unless
> they wanted to get some new feature that was added to them -- and that would
> require source changes anyway to use the new feature.
> 
> As more apps use Spread and possibly more apps on the same machine use it
> (and some users require shared libraries for stuff like the apache modules) 
> I know there is interest in supporting shared libraries (which is why it is
> undocumented, but exists in the makefiles :-)) It will change the rules for
> backwards compatibility so we have been cautious with enabling it.
> 
> I would also be interested in any feedback on how the shared libraries are
> working and thoughts on how useful they are compared with the static ones.
> 
> Jonathan
> 
> On Wed, Mar 06, 2002 at 08:14:50AM +1100, Joshua Goodall wrote:
> > Has anyone tested spread/clients using the .so's rather than the
> > .a libraries?
> > 
> > Now that I'm a package maintainer, I care about these things (to
> > avoid questions of the form "I upgraded my Spread package but my
> > binaries are still using the old library... why?").
> > 
> > Joshua
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Spread-users mailing list
> > Spread-users at lists.spread.org
> > http://lists.spread.org/mailman/listinfo/spread-users
> 
> -- 
> -------------------------------------------------------
> Jonathan R. Stanton         jonathan at cs.jhu.edu
> Dept. of Computer Science   
> Johns Hopkins University    
> -------------------------------------------------------