REMINDER: Don't dynamically link distributed executables (was Re: question about paragraph in INSTALL file)

Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1999 22:08:43 -0800 (PST) From: Martin Buchholz <martin(a)xemacs.org&gt; Only for external packages, which are not standard system libraries installed in standard directories like /usr/lib which the linker already knows about. The problem with this in the arena of dynamic loading, the idea of a standard library is pretty much a myth even on commercial systems like SunOS/Solaris and especially on systems like Linux where virtually every system is different. Despite all of the efforts to have people find the very oldest versions of libraries when building Sun executables for distribution (a sign of how evil dynamic loading is in general!), every dynamicly linked executable that I've ever seen produced at least warnings on some machines. Part of the problem is that some boxes go *way* too long between upgrades, but most of the problem is that shipping a dynamically linked executable means shipping a hope and a prayer -- you really don't know what's ultimately being run unless you have access to *every* machine on which the program will run. If you're distributing an executable over the net, it should be statically linked, period. Disk and memory are cheap, throwing out program integrity to save disk and memory makes no sense. I think it's great to have the ability to dynamically load additional libraries once things are up and running, but it's truly wrong to dynamically link a library that has to be loaded on each execution. Rick