Re: [Plib-devel] Creating shared libs or plib under Linux

[Martin S. <Mar...@mg...>]

Hans de Goede wrote:
> Bram Stolk wrote:
>> I believe that it was Steve Baker's intention to do static only,
>> to avoid issues with incompatibilities.
>> 
>> Basically, static libs are more foolproof.
> 
> Actually static libs are a very good ways to keep being bitten by old
> bugs.

I agree that in most situations this is actually the case. PLIB is a
bit different here ....

When you look at the facts, PLIB, still having active contributors, is
actually without maintainer. The former maintainer, as Bram already
noted, intended to have static PLIB only.  Previously, backwards-
compatibility was intentionally and explicitely not cared about - and I
myself have been bitten by this several times when I was maintaining my
own PLIB-shared-library patch for a while.
Currently PLIB is a moving target, the most actual 'release' is what
you get out of CVS today; sometimes people add patches that break
building PLIB on other people's platform and nobody cares .... (I've
been bitten by this as well).

I suggest to put this idea of adding such a 'shared-library-mode' to
the 'official' PLIB source tree on hold as long as there's no
maintainer who'll try to take care of backwards compatilbility with
previously issued binaries.

Cheers,
	Martin.
-- 
 Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are !
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