Re: xinerama and bin compat

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

jacob berkman <jacob ximian com> writes:

> i recently upgraded pango/gtk to HEAD on my osx laptop, and ran into a
> snag (well, other than no text being drawn when i use GDK_USE_XFT=1).
> 
> i built gdk w/ xinerama support.  however, on my system xinerama is
> supplied as a static library (rhl 7.3 is the same).  the problem is that
> the xinerama calls don't get linked into gdk, so when i run an app i
> get:
> 
>         jacob localhost:jacob$ gimp
>         dyld: gimp-1.3 Undefined symbols:
>         _XineramaIsActive
>         _XineramaQueryScreens
>         
> (ignore the _'s)
> 
> which pretty much seems like breaking bin compat ;)
> 
> talking to jamesh, it seems this will be a problem on some platforms but
> not others - it depends on what libtool/the linker decide to do.
> 
> for now, i've gotten around this by building Xinerama.c in my gdk, but
> was wondering if there was a planned solution for this, or if it's a new
> problem?

No, it's not something I've thought about. We can't simply 
stick the Xinerama libraries into the pkg-config output because
the reason no dynamic library is built is that it is considered
unstable. (Basically, the attempt to prevent people from being
hurt by library instability is preventing us from insulating
people from that instability.)

I think the right solution is probably just to disable Xinerama
unless it is explicitely enabled until the X people get their
act together.

Regards,
                                        Owen