Re: libfdt shared library

[David Gibson <david-xT8FGy+AXnRB3Ne2BGzF6laj5H9X9Tb+@public.gmane.org>]

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 12:47:52PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> There's been a bug open for a while to get a libfdt shared
> library built in Fedora:
> 
> http://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=443882
> 
> This would have benefits for things like qemu and other
> applications that don't really need to statically link the
> libfdt.a into the binary itself.
> 
> The reason we're waiting is because it would be best to
> have the upstream project define the soname and versioning
> that would be used.  As mentioned in the bug, it could be
> as simple as using the base dtc version that it is split
> from, but for commonality reasons we'd want to settle on
> a single way to do it.  That belongs upstream.
> 
> So this is my plea for coming up with a solution.  I can
> code up patches, but I thought some discussion would be
> proper first.

Um.. well.. first for your immediate issue of getting libfdt into
Fedora, can I suggest you just use the static library.  Sure, a shared
library would be nice, but libfdt is sufficiently small that I don't
think it's that bad to link statically with it.

Longer term it would be nice to build a shared object of libfdt with
the rest.  Soname is pretty easy to come up with, but we should
possibly also do symbol versioning for further security against future
changes breaking things.  My current philosophy is to try very hard to
keep the libfdt API stable, but not try particularly hard to keep the
ABI stable.

-- 
David Gibson			| I'll have my music baroque, and my code
david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au	| minimalist, thank you.  NOT _the_ _other_
				| _way_ _around_!
http://www.ozlabs.org/~dgibson