Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] RFC: Binary dependency tracking

[Paul de Vrieze <pauldv@gentoo.org>]

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On Wednesday 06 April 2005 00:38, Jeremy Huddleston wrote:
> Well, I've glossed over the dlopen() issues for now as I'm not sure the
> best way to handle that or even if it needs to be addressed.  How often
> does something dlopen() a file if it doesn't know the exact filename at
> compile time?  It seems unlikely to me that this kind of dependency
> would be introduced which wouldn't be uniquely satisfied by the
> RDEPEND. Does anyone know of a case where we'd do something like:

In general dlopen is used for plugins. Dlopen allows to define library 
requirements at runtime. Often these requirements are optional in the 
case of plugins and the like. With plugins the name of the plugin is 
often unknown. For required dependencies where the name is allready known 
in advance it doesn't really make sense to use dlopen which is a lot more 
complex than a normal link.

If you look at kde it massively uses plugins. One of the tricks that is 
played is caused by the fact that the kde and qt libraries are massive 
(take quite a time to load) and shared by most kde applications. The 
trick is then to run a process (kdeinit) that is allready loaded and have 
this process fork and let the fork load the actual application as plugin. 
This result in faster load times even (especially) in absense of 
prelinking.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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