Linux question

[ryanx at indy.rr.com]

On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 11:05:45PM -0400, Fairlight said:

> I can, I think.  It just snapped into my head why it happened at RH9.
> 
> That's when they back-ported NPTL and the API/ABI changes into the kernel,
> and a few other things changed with libraries.  Static linking became
> "non-static" in the sense that a statically linked program was calling on
> another function that was in one of the newer libraries (I want to say
> nsswitch, and I'm pretty sure I'm right--I think Ryan could confirm or
> correct that).  The whole "static does not mean static, exactly," thing was
> a bit annoying.

Thats right. filePro calls getpwnam() which in turn calls nsswitch() which 
unfortunately now calls PAM methods via dl_open(). I don't recall the exact
terms, but the paramters and/or file locations used by the part of nsswitch 
that was statically linked into filePro is not compatible with its counterpart
in the non-static "static" libraries in RH 9.

However, by linking filePro dynamically we were able to be both forwards and 
backwards compatible. The choice was obvious.

-- 
Ryan
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