Re: Clarification needed about libbtrfs & libbtrfsutil

[Omar Sandoval <osandov@osandov.com>]

On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 09:40:19AM +0100, Dimitri John Ledkov wrote:
> Are both of these meant to be public libraries, installed on the user
> systems, and available in .so variant as well for 3rd party
> development and public dynamic linking?
> 
> Or are these private internal libraries, which are installed as public
> runtime only, simply to share code between the utils, but otherwise
> provide no abi stability and will forever remain libfoo.so.0?

They're both meant to be public. In fact, libbtrfsutil is already 1.0.0.

> Or should these even be a noinst_ libraries (~= Libtool Convenience
> Libraries), and are simply intermediate by-products?
> 
> I'm asking because despite compiling shared & static variants of these
> libraries, and "shared linked" and "static linked" variants of the
> utils, it appears that all utilities are statically linking against
> libbtrfs/libbtrfsutils. Thus no binaries nor bindings, dynamically
> link against neither libbtrfs nor libbtrfsutil.
> 
> Tweaking the makefile to use libs_shared variable instead of libs or
> libs_static, results in slightly smaller binaries, dynamically linked
> against libbtrfs/libbtrfsutil.
> 
> But it is hard to tell if this is a bug/mistake, or an intentional feature.

I'm not sure why we statically link libbtrfs into the the tools, and I
just copied that for libbtrfsutil.