Re: SUMMARY: Re: shared library -dev package naming proposal
>>>>> "Steve" == Steve Greenland <steveg@moregruel.net> writes:
>> fact 3: libtool library libtool tries to implement a wrapper
>> around shared library and static library, so that both of them
>> can be uniformly processed, and allows specifying just: libtool
>> cc -lnewt a.c
Steve> Why is this better?
Because it means your application you are linking does not need to
know the implementation details behind libnewt, or what libraries this
particular version of libnewt happens to require. This might not be a
sane example, but consider if the maintainer of libnewt suddenly
recompiled new versions of the package to depend on libssl for
example, this might result in all applications that use libnewt
statically unable to build, because the list of libraries is hard
coded.
This example is simple, for a more complicated example, see the
Heimdal libraries...
This may be important if you require a static version for any reason
or your platform doesn't support interdependencies between shared
libraries. I think there is at least one OS without good support for
shared libraries - what was its name again? - not very common - I
think its called "MS-Windows".
--
Brian May <bam@debian.org>
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