Re: Dependency libraries and ABI

[Keith Packard <keithp keithp com>]

Around 16 o'clock on Feb 28, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> Maybe it makes sense for fontconfig/Xft to ship its own
> statically-linked copy of expat that's been sed-jobbed into the
> fontconfig/Xft namespace?

Which apps do you see that have static copies?  RedHat, SuSE and Debian 
all ship the same major version shared library installed by default.

I know Moz ships a static linked copy of expat, but that's in a separate 
.so that isn't loaded GLOBAL so it isn't a problem.

> Which reminds me, I'm not sure we have strong ABI guarantees on
> freetype either, or guarantees that parallel install will be provided
> when the ABI changes, or any of that stuff.

The FreeType folks have this nailed; now that XFree86 depends on them, 
they've got a lot of people watching every move.

Keith Packard        XFree86 Core Team        Compaq Cambridge Research Lab