[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] Support dynamic loading of third-party libs

[Marc Giger]

Hi Nicolas,

On Wed, 14 Jan 2015 21:33:25 +0100
Nicolas George <george at nsup.org> wrote:

> Le quintidi 25 nivôse, an CCXXIII, Marc Giger a écrit :
> >			   For example if they want use libfaac then
> > they should be able to do so without that much hassle a full
> > compilation inclusive all dependencies can be.
> 
> I was expecting something like that. Unfortunately, it does not work
> that way: dlopen()ing libfaac will not allow you to omit
> --enable-nonfree and to redistribute the resulting binary, because
> the libfaac wrapper still includes the faac headers, which contain
> non-trivial code (including a big structure definition) that get
> translated into the resulting object file.

That's a very good point. Never thought about it in this detail.
Given that fact I have to admin that dynamic loading makes
less sense. There may still be some usecases e.g. vaapi where it
would make sense, but this seems to be the minority.

> 
> Apart from that, I fully agree with Michael's last comment: using
> dynamic linker black magic to make this lazy linking transparent is
> the best option to implement that feature if it is deemed useful.

libffi ?


Thanks for the clarification.

Marc


> 
> >				     On Linux/OpenSource OS's things
> >	are
> > easy, on proprietary platforms ...
> 
> Nothing prevents users on proprietary platforms from adopting
> automated repositories like Debian's apt system and everything that
> imitated it since to install Libre software, except the users'
> habits. Using such a repository to distribute your project is a good
> way of pushing users to change their habits for the better.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> -- 
>   Nicolas George