Re: What to do with modules now ...
Paul Flinders <paul(a)dawa.demon.co.uk> writes:
Hrvoje Niksic writes:
> Paul Flinders <paul(a)dawa.demon.co.uk> 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.