*BSD News Article 89952


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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Shared libraries in packages
Date: 23 Feb 1997 19:13:00 GMT
Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden
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Yaron Zabary <yaron@netaccess.co.il> wrote:

>   I have ran into this twice now. Things in packages (xemacs and squid)
> are built in a system which has libraries (Motif and libmalloc) which
> are not part of ordinary distribution. I wonder, how painful would it
> be to compile the packages on a machine which was installed from scratch
> and does not have libraries which the common user does not have.

Well, that's indeed the intention -- however, consider that Satoshi
has to build some 700 or so packages when it comes to release time.
Of course, he cannot reinstall the machine from scratch for each of
them. :-)

Both were basically accidents, although it's fairly simple to create a
dummy libmalloc.  (Just compile an empty object file, and link it to a
shared lib.  The shared loader will then pick the malloc() from libc,
which is what you want.)

Motif is _intended_ to go there, so the packages that require Motif
can be shipped as binaries for the Motif-impaired (with libXm
statically linked).  The accident here was that Xemacs decided to link
against Motif despite of not being supposed to, just because it found
the Motif libs around by the time being built.  This wasn't
anticipated by the port (since the port's maintainer apparently hasn't
Motif himself, so he didn't notice it).

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)