libfdt shared library

[Josh Boyer]

On Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:38:19 +1100
David Gibson <david at gibson.dropbear.id.au> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 12:47:52PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
> > Hi All,
> > 
> > There's been a bug open for a while to get a libfdt shared
> > library built in Fedora:
> > 
> > http://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=443882
> > 
> > This would have benefits for things like qemu and other
> > applications that don't really need to statically link the
> > libfdt.a into the binary itself.
> > 
> > The reason we're waiting is because it would be best to
> > have the upstream project define the soname and versioning
> > that would be used.  As mentioned in the bug, it could be
> > as simple as using the base dtc version that it is split
> > from, but for commonality reasons we'd want to settle on
> > a single way to do it.  That belongs upstream.
> > 
> > So this is my plea for coming up with a solution.  I can
> > code up patches, but I thought some discussion would be
> > proper first.
> 
> Um.. well.. first for your immediate issue of getting libfdt into
> Fedora, can I suggest you just use the static library.  Sure, a shared
> library would be nice, but libfdt is sufficiently small that I don't
> think it's that bad to link statically with it.

It's sort-of already in Fedora.  At least the source is in DTC.
However, Fedora has rules about static libraries and when they can be
provided.  I asked about this in the above bug report, but really what
we're after is the shared version.

> Longer term it would be nice to build a shared object of libfdt with
> the rest.  Soname is pretty easy to come up with, but we should
> possibly also do symbol versioning for further security against future
> changes breaking things.  My current philosophy is to try very hard to
> keep the libfdt API stable, but not try particularly hard to keep the
> ABI stable.

OK, fine by me.  Do you want to continue on with that, or should I look
at doing something along those lines?  The symbol versioning part would
take me a bit.

josh