[Xorg] shared vs static libraries

Egbert Eich eich at pdx.freedesktop.org
Mon Aug 23 03:18:57 PDT 2004


Jim Gettys writes:
 > And recent experience showed us that making a library static
 > reduced our options greatly in compatibility.
 >                            
 > This caused great anguish with the changes to xinerama; we couldn't
 > update apps to use a new protocol version.
 > 

I agree that static libs create more problems than they solve - however
the Xinerama case is a bad example: here the compatibility should have
been added to the protocol layer in the server. You don't want to update
shared libs on every client system when you bump the version of an extension
on a server - especially when the old version of Xinerama has been well
established over several years.

Egbert.



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