[fpc-devel] LinkLib Issues In Lazarus and in FPC-2.0.2

[Jonas Maebe]

On 17 Jul 2006, at 12:21, Daniël Mantione wrote:

>> That doesn't mean Mac OS X doesn't potentially have the same  
>> library problems
>> though, since most open source based libraries are not distributed  
>> as a
>> framework.
>
> IMHO crap like *_config are only tricks used by C people used to work
> around defficiencies in their toolchains.

There's nothing C-specific about libraries, nor about the *config  
scripts. At most it would be linker-specific.

> There simply should be no reason
> why you want such complexity. A library has a name, you link to it by
> name, basta.

A library also exist in at least multiple locations, versions (both  
ABI-compatible and -incompatible with previous versions) and  
implementations (e.g. a native Mac OS X GTK and an X-based one).

You can of course give everything a different name (which is what  
often happens in practice), but that doesn't work all that well as  
demonstrated by everyone's experience.

> If people start renaming libraries we make us resistant to library  
> name
> changes. Otherwise the compiler needs to support a_config for  
> library x
> and b_config for package and the end is loose.

The whole point of the *config stuff is exactly to be resistant  
against that.


Jonas