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Re: Moving to shared libraries?



Dear Mike,


Am Montag, den 16.04.2012, 21:31 -0400 schrieb Michael Alan Dorman:
> Joachim Breitner <nomeata@debian.org> writes:
> > yes, there has been discussion, and as far I as know, the reasons in
> > http://lists.debian.org/debian-haskell/2010/03/msg00122.html
> > still apply. Plus, I think, it is not supported on all architectures.
> 
> Thanks for pointing out the older discussion.
> 
> My personal interest in using dynamic libraries stems from the desire to
> to run multiple applications with a greater amount of code shared,
> making hosting those applications on a memory constrained shared virtual
> host more feasible.

that is an interesting use case that I did not consider before.

> And, of course, there are all the other reasons that usually recommend
> shared libraries---getting security fixes without requiring recompiles, etc.

Unfortunately, the benefit of „no recompiles“ does not apply to Haskell.
The package id includes the version, so every version bump requires a
recompilation, unless we leave the version at what it is, e.g. when
adding a Debian patch. But even then it is likely the the patch will
somehow affect the ABI, which includes the _definitions_ of
_potentially_ inlined functions and force a recompilation. 

> That said, it does sound like there are a lot of technical issues.  I
> wonder if some of the infrastructure that the C++ developers have used
> to try to handle ABI changes could be helpful?

I don’t know much about their infrastructure; can you tell us a bit
more?

> Regardless, I don't necessarily expect anyone to do this _for_ me, but I
> hope that if I could come up with some specific suggestions for how to
> deal with this that it would be at least considered?

If there is sufficient demand we could add -dyn packages for all
libraries, this would allow you to build your applications dynamically
locally. For -dyn packages, the recompilation problem is not a big
problem, as we have to recompile it anyways for the -dev package. The
cost ist mainly in mirror space and the extended build time, plus some
work in configuring hlibrary.mk.

Greetings,
Joachim

-- 
Joachim "nomeata" Breitner
Debian Developer
  nomeata@debian.org | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Keyid: 4743206C
  JID: nomeata@joachim-breitner.de | http://people.debian.org/~nomeata

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