Re: Managing Guile and extensions versions

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Kevin Ryde <address@hidden> writes:

> Remember if you want to call a C code module directly from a C
> mainline then you need something the ordinary loader can cope with
> too.
>
> (If setting up something clean and portable for this stuff was easy it
> would have already been done.)

You're talking about loading the right version of shared library, right?

In fact, Libtool's versioning mechanism already makes this possible for
programs: the loader and/or dynamic linker chooses the one version of
the library the program expects to be linked against.

As for the `dlopen' equivalent to this, intuitively, I can't think of
any reason not to allow this (my understanding of the problem might be
too poor though).  For instance, `dlopen ("/lib/mylib.so.2.3.4")' does
load a specific version of the lib, but in a non-portable and unclear
way.  `libltdl' could provide a higher-level, portable API to do such
things.

But again, we're getting a bit off-topic.  ;-)

(However, I'd be glad to hear your thoughts about adding support for
versioning to Guile's module system.)

Thanks,
Ludovic.