Re: relocatable by default?

[Bruno Haible]

Hello Sylvain,

Sylvain Beucler wrote:
> I noticed that even if I imported the 'relocatable-prog' module,
> ./configure still requires the user to type '--enable-relocatable' to
> take this into account.
> 
> I guess that most users won't notice this switch, and compile a
> non-relocatable binary.
> 
> Is there a reason why ENABLE_RELOCATABLE is not set to 1 by default?

There are two reasons:

  1) On all platforms except Linux, --enable-relocatable creates wrappers
     for each installed program, thus slowing down a bit the startup time
     of the programs. It is not wise to have the default behaviour depend
     on the platform, so I prefer to have it turned off by default.

  2) There is a security issue involved when installing shared libraries with
     --enable-relocatable, if the documentation in doc/relocatable.texi
     is ignored. I wouldn't bet that every user of --enable-relocatable
     actually reads and follows this documentation.

Bruno