Re: [Plplot-devel] linking

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On Sun, 1 Sep 2002, Geoffrey Furnish wrote:

> I'm really happy to read of the progress on dynloading of PLplot into
> Tcl, and of the progress on dynlinking the libraries, and all this
> better library organization and so forth.
>
> I think it is very important to keep the code building in static
> configuration, since that is all we support on most platforms.  In
> particular, I need the code to keep working on Solaris.  As a
> secondary matter, I want to get dynlinking (shared libs) on Solaris at
> the earlist possible moment, but until then, I think it is critically
> important to keep static linking working on all platforms.

Certainly, by the time of the next release we must have cross-platform
linking that is working properly for Unix/Linux, but for me the first
priority was to get consensus for the linking of shared libraries under
Linux. To further that effort, I felt it was important to use CVS HEAD to
present working (at least on Linux) shared library linking solutions for
discussion and refinement.  Until that process was completed, I presumed
PLplot 5.1.0 would serve everybody's mission critical cross-platform needs.

However, if that presumption is wrong and you need a feature that is
currently only in CVS HEAD for your mission-critical cross-platform work, it
wouldn't be too difficult for you to change one or two configuration lines
(as I recall, I just commented them out and left the infrastructure in
place) to add a long list of libraries to any application link step as a
temporary measure. I believe it is that "long-list" approach for linking
applications that makes everything sort of work cross-platform.  Such a
change should only temporararily interfere with my hierarchical linking
approach for the applications, but should not affect the hierarchical
linking of the libraries.

Alan