Depending on external libraries

[Egbert Eich]

Kendall Bennett writes:
 > For me I just want to grab the latest tarball for the piece I am 
 > interested in (Xserver only - I doubt I will be touching Xlibs in the 
 > near future) and be able to build it without having to head off and 
 > download gobs of upstream packages. Especially if installing those 
 > upstream packages on my system is going to cause major dependency 
 > headaches for my entire OS distro. I would hate to be dependant on an 
 > upstream version of zlib for instance that might potentially break my OS 
 > install!
 > 

That is definitely a valid argument. You should not have to install
any of the required pieces on the system to build your application.
In fact you should be able to instruct your build system to link
against a static version of the zlib in your build environment if 
you are not allowed to touch the shared lib installed on your system.
I don't know if this is possible at the moment.

However I can think of one place where this theory will not work:

The freetype Xserver module depends on freetype. If you are using
an externally supplied version of freetype you *need* a shared lib.
If you try to link an externally supplied static freetype lib against a 
non-so driver module it will not able to find libc functions when
loaded into the server.
A way around this problem would be to install a new version of libfreetype
alongside the other driver modules and make dlopen look there before 
looking at the standard locations for shared libs.


Egbert.