Re: Google Summer of Code - some ideas

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: address@hidden (Jérémie Courrèges-Anglas)
> Cc: Aurélien Aptel <address@hidden>,
>         address@hidden, address@hidden
> Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2013 22:16:17 +0200
> 
> I'm probably not knowledgeable enough about this subject, but... is it
> really easier to get this (raw dlopening) right?  If my Emacs build
> dlopens gnutls with a major 39, and a few days later my system gets
> a 40th gnutls major version because of ABI change, then I will run into
> problems.  And I can't count on my package tools dependancy system to
> notice the ABI change, unless I artificially encode the dependancy on
> gnutls or take care to bump my Emacs package to force a rebuild.
> 
> Perhaps are there workarounds or methods to implement this safely in
> Emacs, but I fear that it would make life harder for some users and
> packagers.

Emacs already has a solution for all this, in the MS-Windows build
(which already loads these libraries dynamically).  So what's needed
is to use the same arrangement on other platforms, which currently
link statically against these libraries.

In  nutshell, the version against which Emacs was compiled is recorded
at build time, and then tested against the library at load time.