Modules and shared libs

[Ian Grant <I.A.N.Grant@damtp.cam.ac.uk>]

I have run into a problem with the Postgres interface. It's that my glue
is a shared library between guile and a shared library called libpq. The
present libtool will not build a dlopen()able shared library that depends
on another shared library, even where it's possible to do so.

Marius had this problem with guile-gtk and he ships a gtkdlopenhelper.so
to do dlopen()s of shlibs with RTLD_GLOBAL set so that references are
resolved down the chain. I don't know for how many OS/compiler cobinations
this works, but is there any chance we could integrate those two
dlopenhelper functions or some equivalent into libguile? That way every
module maintainer won't have to ship their own dlopenhelper.so library.

It's going to be very hard to do a decent SQL interface if we can't link
guile modules to the vendor-supplied library interfaces.

I'd say this is so urgent it should be considered for 1.3.1. Marius knows
a hell of a lot more about these things than I do though, so maybe he has
a better idea.

Ian

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ian Grant, Computer Officer (HEP group), DAMTP, Silver St., Cambridge CB3 9EW