[Ffmpeg-devel] [RFC] dlopen vs linking for external libraries

[Diego Biurrun]

On Sun, Feb 11, 2007 at 08:06:11PM +0100, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> 
> On Sun, Feb 11, 2007 at 07:44:57PM +0100, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> > This topic just came up while talking with Mans on IRC..
> > 
> > Currently we have two different methods of integrating external
> > libraries: dlopen or (dynamic) linking.  Or rather some libs offer one
> > option or the other or both.  libfaad supports both variants, liba52
> > just dlopen after my last changes, the others just linking.
> > 
> > So the question is if we should drop dlopen or not.  Mans is in favor, I
> > tend to agree.  In any case we should be consistent.
> > 
> > Opinions?
> 
> keep dlopen and drop linking if you want to drop something, i really hate
> it if a application has 500 dependancies which you have to install even
> though you dont use any of them or having 500 variants of a application
> 
> of course you could argue that we should not care about binary packages
> but only support things compiled from source ...

I would argue that we should not care about binary packages with
excessive dependencies.  Also, liba52 is soon going to be a strictly
optional feature when we have a native AC3 decoder.

And why support dlopen only for two external libraries?  Why not all?

I have doubts how compatible all of this is, anyway:

static const char* liba52name = "liba52.so.0";

The shared library is not called that on my system..

Diego