Re: gnome desktop integration library

[JP Rosevear <jpr novell com>]

On Tue, 2006-09-05 at 11:32 -0400, Daniel Macks wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 05:05:10PM +0200, Xavier Bestel wrote:
> > On Tue, 2006-09-05 at 16:43, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> > [...]
> > > So, one thing that has been on my mind for long is to get those small
> > > libraries and merge them together
> 
> Fewer library packages would also be a good thing for packagers. Don't
> have to do as much dependency tracking and explicit versioning of
> dependencies. OTOH...
> 
> > [...]
> > > When the library grows, we could separate it into different .so's
> > 
> > Don't do that (the separation). If you merge the different libraries
> > together, you'll merge the sections together. As they must be stored
> > with a page granularity (4k) you'll earn 2k by merged library on
> > average, plus less time spent in ld.so for resolving inter-library
> > dependencies (and yet another memory win). If you separate that into
> > different .so's you loose what you just won.
> 
> Also, please remember that every time you move a symbol that is part
> of the public interface from one library file to another, the soname
> of the former-location and new-location shared libraries changes. Even
> if it's all in the same "library package". And changing the soname of
> just some of the shared libraries in a package that contains many
> shared libs is a packager nightmare.

This is a long term concern, however gnome-desktop isn't even part of
the platform (which is another problem IMHO) so there are no compat
guarantees in place.

-JP
-- 
JP Rosevear <jpr novell com>
Novell, Inc.