Re: shared libraries policy

[Bill Allombert <allomber@math.u-bordeaux.fr>]

Marco d'Itri wrote:
>  I think that policy needs two small corrections to reflect current
>  practices wrt shared libraries and PIC code:
>  
>  - what is PIC library needs to be correctly defined: compiling with
>  -fPIC is not enough to have PIC code, the object MUST NOT have a
>  TEXTREL section either [any other symbols need to be checked? What
>  about non-i386 architectures?]

I second this. This is checked correctly by lintian BTW.

>  - libraries can contain short sections of non-PIC code on architectures
>  which allow this [i386 is OK, any other?] if this allows a
>  significant speed increase.

This should be expended to cover the case of assembly files/ __asm__
directives that are provided for some architectures and are not
PIC aware, on architectures which allow this. The rationale being that
-fPIC will not make suddently the asm code PIC aware. But maybe
it is the situation that was supposed to be covered by this section after all 
?

Architectures allowing this are at least i386, sparc, s390. This was allowed 
on alpha some time ago, but I am not sure as of today.

Cheers,
-- 
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>