Re: RFC: Handling of mozilla libraries

[Martin Schulze <joey@infodrom.org>]

Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Instead of randomly breaking things, maybe it is time to rethink how
> mozilla's libraries are handled. As I understand it, moving those
> libraries to /usr/lib/mozilla is dictated by the fact they don't have a
> SONAME (and we require a SONAME for libs in /usr/lib). But then, the
> linker cannot find them anymore as they are not in one of its
> directories.
> There are at least 3 very important issues regarding these libraries :
> 1) libraries without SONAME
> 2) libraries in /usr/lib/mozilla
> 3) no stable ABI and nothing in the packaging to prevent breakage
> 
> 1) could be solved by adding a SONAME. This would render us
> binary-incompatible with upstream, but I don't think anyone is using
> binary applications linked against mozilla today.
> This would automatically solve 2), and 3) could be solved with putting
> the libraries in a separate package.

Do these libraries have to be maintained by the regular linker?
If not, they could be load via dlopen() from any directory (like Apache
or PHP are handling their libraries).  If that's not an option, and
since Mozilla and Galeon are usually started via a wrapper script,
couldn't you add an LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable to its environment so
that the linker will find libraries in /usr/lib/mozilla as well?

Regards,

	Joey

-- 
Ten years and still binary compatible.  -- XFree86