Re: Why kdelibs4-dev and XFree86 4.3.0 don't play nice together (was: Re: xlibs-pic)
On Wed, 2003-06-04 at 01:51, John Gay wrote:
> >> This was my understanding as well. As I understand the situation, -fPIC
> is
> >> preferable to the non-PIC code which was there before.
> >
> >It's not quite that simple. This is about static libraries, which policy
> >requires to be built without -fPIC. The problem arises when linking them
> >into shared objects, for which there's xlibs-pic, like other -pic
> >packages.
> >
> Ah! I see, Ted. (Do you really, Dougal? Uhm, No, not really.)
>
> Can you tell that I only know about PIC from a course in O/S's? I'd be
> really interested in a proper explaination for this.
>
> I know that PIC code is 'supposed' to be better in that it can be loaded
> into memory without regard to the actual location or layout. Why should
> static libraries be built without -fPIC, and who's policy is it anyway?
Debian's. I guess the reason is that PIC code usually performs worse
than non-PIC code (at least on weird architectures like i386) and that
static libraries are usually linked directly into applications.
> And why are static lib's being linked into shared objects?
Because some shared libraries (or plugins, or whatever) use some X
extension libraries which are only available in static form. But non-PIC
code in a shared object is a bad idea, it (like so many things...) only
works on i386 (and maybe some other architectures) by coincidence. On
other architectures, this causes build or run time errors.
--
Earthling Michel Dänzer \ Debian (powerpc), XFree86 and DRI developer
Software libre enthusiast \ http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=daenzer
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