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On Wednesday 06 April 2005 00:38, Jeremy Huddleston wrote: |
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> Well, I've glossed over the dlopen() issues for now as I'm not sure the |
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> best way to handle that or even if it needs to be addressed. How often |
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> does something dlopen() a file if it doesn't know the exact filename at |
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> compile time? It seems unlikely to me that this kind of dependency |
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> would be introduced which wouldn't be uniquely satisfied by the |
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> RDEPEND. Does anyone know of a case where we'd do something like: |
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|
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In general dlopen is used for plugins. Dlopen allows to define library |
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requirements at runtime. Often these requirements are optional in the |
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case of plugins and the like. With plugins the name of the plugin is |
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often unknown. For required dependencies where the name is allready known |
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in advance it doesn't really make sense to use dlopen which is a lot more |
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complex than a normal link. |
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|
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If you look at kde it massively uses plugins. One of the tricks that is |
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played is caused by the fact that the kde and qt libraries are massive |
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(take quite a time to load) and shared by most kde applications. The |
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trick is then to run a process (kdeinit) that is allready loaded and have |
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this process fork and let the fork load the actual application as plugin. |
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This result in faster load times even (especially) in absense of |
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prelinking. |
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|
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Paul |
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|
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-- |
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Paul de Vrieze |
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Gentoo Developer |
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Mail: pauldv@g.o |
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Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net |
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