[fpc-pascal] A linking error when compiling with FPC 2.4.4

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Mon, 31 Oct 2011, Marco van de Voort wrote:

> In our previous episode, Jonas Maebe said:
>>> On Mon, 31 Oct 2011, Jonas Maebe wrote:
>>>
>>>> sqlite3 is not part of FPC. You probably have to install the sqlite3-dev
>>>> package or something like that.  Arguably, that should be a dependency of
>>>> the fpc .deb package that installs support for interfacing with sqlite3.
>>>
>>> I advise against this.
>>
>> Afaik it is already the case for most FPC .debs as shipped with Debian
>> (there have been plenty of discussions about that in the past).  It's how
>> Debian tries to prevent problems like the one in this thread.  Doing it in
>> most cases but not in all is however worse than either doing it always or
>> never doing it.
>
> It is a problem if in FPC's case the common use is the "other" one (via
> fcl-db that uses the dynloaded variants)
>
> If this is really needed, we probably need to make the package granularity
> finer. (-dyn and static in separate packages, so that the static one alone
> gets the dependency. Lazarus then only depends on the dyn packages).

That would be a regular nightmare, because there are many packages that depend 
on fcl-db, and this would split all these packages in 2 variants.

There is a good reason that apache, php, ODBC and many other large programs/
libraries introduced dynamically loadable packages. It saves you from 
having to recompile everything for your particular system, and thus makes
maintenance and installation simpler.

So if anything, IMHO we should make all packages that link in external C libs 
"dynamically loaded".

Michael.