Re: What to do with modules now ...

Paul Flinders <paul(a)dawa.demon.co.uk&gt; writes: > Hrvoje Niksic writes: > > Paul Flinders <paul(a)dawa.demon.co.uk&gt; writes: > > > > > > 1) How will you handle this on systems without dynamic linking > > > > (e.g. Ultrix)? > > > > > > You could use the (new) XFree module loader > > > > I don't understand this. Could you please elaborate? > > XFree 4.0 uses a module loader donated by MetroLink which can load > elf, a.out and coff object files (or archive libraries for that > matter). I don't see why systems without dynamic linkage couldn't > use it. Because systems without dynamic linkage do not offer low-level runtime loading semantics? It may be my short-sightedness, but I've never seen executables dynamically loading object files under Ultrix. It might be done through heavy machine-dependent hackery, though, but I don't believe XFree does it until I see it. Even if it worked under Ultrix, XEmacs needn't strictly depend on X and, more importantly, the machine running XEmacs needn't host an X server and the associated libraries. I'm not saying that Ultrix should hamper progress; my point is that: 1) if we do make decisions that will affect ancient systems like Ultrix, we should make them consciously and openly. 2) before doing that, we might want to look into others' solution; it might be interesting to see what Perl 5 and zsh 3.1 do under Ultrix.