Re: GModule unloading

["Matt Hoosier" <matt hoosier gmail com>]

On 5/23/07, Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-05-23 at 09:33 -0500, Matt Hoosier wrote:
>
> > That's not really what I'm asking. Suppose there's a regular,
> > garden-variety shared library intended for any old application to use.
> > It's DSO is /usr/lib/libboo.so.0.1.2. Boo registers GTypes statically
> > like any other shared library does.
> >
> > Now some GModule comes along and happens to dynamically link against
> > libboo. The application which loads this module does not itself
> > require libboo. So at the time that the module is dlopen()ed under the
> > hood, libboo gets dynamically loaded also.
> >
> > What happens when the GModule is unloaded? Does libboo also get dumped
> > because the application itself doesn't directly link against
> > liboo.so.0.1.2, or does it stay resident forever?
>
> its a reasonable question. a prior question, however: why are you
> worrying about this?

I'm working on an embedded system for which the startup time of Gtk is
deemed unacceptable for launching auxiliary programs. I was thinking
about using GModules in a way similar to what the maemo-launcher does:
call some psdueo_main() function to instantiate the toplevel window of
each auxiliary "program," then just do a gtk_widget_show() on the
returned UI control.

Often these things will link against shared libraries which the main
shell application itself doesn't. So I'm concerned about whether the
main UI is going to crash when some GType registered during the
lifetime of a module, is made invalid.