[Ffmpeg-devel] [RFC] dlopen vs linking for external libraries

[Roman Shaposhnik]

On Tue, 2007-02-27 at 03:59 +0200, Uoti Urpala wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-02-26 at 17:15 -0800, Roman Shaposhnick wrote:
> >   The problem is -- dynamic linking just doesn't scale. And anybody
> > who disagrees with it should take a look at any application that
> > has to work across different distributions to see that these guys
> > have to lug around things like private versions of glib and the
> > fact that these private versions are .so's hardly makes any difference
> > because for all I care the application could've been statically 
> > compiled with the same net effect. Yes dynamic linking seemed like
> > a good idea at the time, but the realities of software engineering
> > killed it and worst of it is -- nobody is willing to admin that
> > its dead.
> 
> Yes there's no common standard between all the distros, and you have to
> use all kinds of kludges if you insist on using a single binary on all
> of them. So exactly what are you arguing for here? That the distros
> should use the same level of kludginess internally?

  No. I was merely arguing two things:

    1. dynamic loading is underrated and should be considered more by
       software writers.
 
    2. dynamic linking is overrated and it *DOES NOT* solve the problems
       of managing dependencies efficiently

  If we agree on both accounts -- there's nothing to argue about
anymore, its just that your initial emails (the conversation with 
Michael in particular) made me think that you have a reason to
disagree.

Thanks,
Roman.