Re: Unable to load the "aspell" module.

[Brian Stafford <brian stafford uklinux net>]

On Mon, 13 August 20:43 John Merryweather Cooper wrote:
> On 2001.08.13 12:40 christophe barbe wrote:
> > You certainly need the .la file.
> > You can do it yourself or grab it from 
> > http://ufies.org/~christophe/
> > 
> > Christophe
> >
> 
> How are the *.la files used in this context?  I'm in a running "war" with
> the committer on this one in FreeBSD-land--I keep trying to put them in and
> he keeps zipping them out of my distribution.  Hence, spelling is broken
> with Balsa in FreeBSD.  But I need a good argument as to why/how they're
> necessary in this context if I'm going to win . . . :)

The .la files are used by libltdl which is distributed with libtool.  This
provides alternative "portable" APIs to the platform dependent ones for
dynamically loading libraries.

There is a lt_dlopen() function which searches for and loads the named
library.  This opens the system's native format (e.g. .so on Linux) and
also .la files which seem to be intended as part of a platform independent
mechanism.  Unfortunately the file must be named explicitly, including its
extension.  Since aspell specifies a module with the .la extension, that
is all that lt_dlopen() will find, even though it is capable of loading .so
files (or whatever the platform expects).  There is a lt_dlopenext() variant
which will provide the extension as part of a search strategy but sadly
aspell does not use this.

Hope this helps
Brian Stafford