Re: Change to gmodule

[Gary V.Vaughan <gary oranda demon co uk>]

On Thursday 31 May 2001  3:57 pm, Owen Taylor wrote:
> "Gary V.Vaughan" <gary oranda demon co uk> writes:
> > On Tuesday 29 May 2001 12:06 pm, Tim Janik wrote:
> > > On Tue, 29 May 2001, Padraig O'Briain wrote:
> > > > 2) The code in version 1.33 which checked whether the file_name ended
> > > > in G_MODULE_SUFFIX or ".la" and if not, appended a suffix before
> > > > calling _g_module_open() is not in version 1.35.
> > >
> > > hm, that you need to specify libgail.so:libtestobject.so is odd, module
> > > loading works here without path and without suffix, a suffix even.
> > > please try out the new CVS version.
> >
> > I expect my patch to make gmodule a thin wrapper for libltdl would fix
> > this problem... now that libtool-1.4 is out, is there anything holding up
> > acceptance?
>
> To give my point view (and only my point of view), I don't think
> making gmodule a wrapper for libltdl makes sense. As downsides:
>
>  - It adds another shared library to be loaded at runtime
>  - It adds another runtime dependency

``libtoolize --ltdl'' will change this to a compile time dependency.

>  - It adds a dependency on something we don't control.
>
> The upsides are obviously:
>
>  - libltdl may work better now than gmodule does
>  - We don't have to maintain dynamic loading code
>  - there may be increased memory sharing with non-glib packages
>    (say aspell) that use libltdl directly.
>
> But none of these advantages come from using gmodule as a wrapper
> around libltdl, they simply come from using libltdl.
>
> If libltdl is really nice enough that we would want to make gmodule a
> wrapper around it, then we should simply encourage people to use
> libltdl and deprecate gmodule; if libltdl has a significantly worse
> interface than gmodule, than its not going to be easy to wrap
> a nicer interface around it.

I would say that wrapping gmodule around libltdl's nicer interface is easy, 
provided you don't mind losing most of the flexibility and richness afforded 
by it's interface.  But I am biased =)O|

I have two ulterior motives: 

	i) it seems wasteful for the free software community to maintain 2
	   libraries that do broadly the same thing.
	ii) I'd quite like to use soe of the glib data structures for the
	   next release of GNU M4 -- but using glib + libltdl feels messy
	   somehow.

> Regards,
>                                         Owen

Cheers,
	Gary.
-- 
  ())_.  Gary V. Vaughan     gary@(oranda.demon.co.uk|gnu.org)
  ( '/   Research Scientist  http://www.oranda.demon.co.uk        ,_())____
  / )=   GNU Hacker          http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool   \'      `&
`(_~)_   Tech' Author        http://sources.redhat.com/autobook    =`---d__/