Bug#550441: advi: statically links to camlimages

[Stéphane Glondu <steph@glondu.net>]

Michael S Gilbert a écrit :
> thanks for the update on the situation.  based on the link, upstream's
> response is not entirely hostile.  see:
> 
>   Feature 3- (dynamic code loading) is already available in bytecode
>   through the Dynlink API.  I understand there's a demand for having it
>   in native-code as well, and that might be possible without too much
>   fuss, at least on selected operating systems.

This is already done. But this provides dynamic libraries à la dlopen
(i.e. for plugins), but not really shared libraries. The main program is
still statically linked.

> i'm not aware of this as a concern for other packages. why is this a
> larger concern for advi? usually security updates do not change the
> ABI, so this (hopefully) shouldn't be a problem.  and if it is, advi
> will FTBFS, so we will be more acutely aware of the fact that it needs
> to be updated as well.

This is not specific to advi. The ABI of an OCaml library can easily be
broken if you change its sources. AFAIK, in the security update of
camlimages, only the C part has been touched, so indeed, advi would not
have needed recompilation in this specific case.


Cheers,

-- 
Stéphane