[Evolution-hackers] Re: dlopen / API hooks for evolution ...

["Frank Schönheit - Sun Microsystems, Inc." <Frank Schoenheit Sun COM>]

Hi Jayant,

> We had earlier created "dlopen hack" for evo-lib dependancy. Can we
> remove it now!!  

For the evo-lib, I don't consider usage of dlopen a hack. This is
because for a given system, it's more likely for glib to be present than
the evo lib.

If we link the driver against the evo lib, then there is no diagnostics
possibility on a system without evo, since the driver will simply not
load at runtime. If we don't link against the evo lib, then the driver
can at least be loaded, and has more possiblities to give the user a
reasonable feedback when she attempts a connection.

To the user, this might be the difference between "Evolution does not
appear in the UI at all, so I don't even know about it", and "when I
select Evolution, it gives me a message like 'No suitable Evolution
version was found'". This may not sounds too much, but personally I'd
consider it worth it :) (the more since the code is already there now.)

Not to mention that before glibc 2.2.5, there's a bug in the library
loader which causes subsequent calls to dlopen to *crash*, if you had
one call which failed. So the more likely any library fails to load, the
more likely OOo will crash a minute later.

Ciao
Frank

-- 
- Frank Sch�it, Software Engineer         frank schoenheit sun com -
- Sun Microsystems, Inc.                           http://www.sun.com -
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