Suitability for shared-library use?

[CrusadingKNIGHT <cr...@gawab.com>]

Hello, I recently noticed APR would be a good candidate for an
abstraction library, since it's much smaller than almost all of
the alternatives, and is quite mature. However, the UNIX
compiling page mentions that "APR is not quite ready to be
installed as a system-wide shared library". I'm just wondering
why this is the case, and what, if any corner cases I should be
prepared for if I attempt to use it as a shared library.

Thanks in advance for your help.
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Re: Suitability for shared-library use?

["William A. Rowe, Jr." <wr...@rowe-clan.net>]

CrusadingKNIGHT wrote:
> Hello, I recently noticed APR would be a good candidate for an
> abstraction library, since it's much smaller than almost all of
> the alternatives, and is quite mature. However, the UNIX
> compiling page mentions that "APR is not quite ready to be
> installed as a system-wide shared library". I'm just wondering
> why this is the case, and what, if any corner cases I should be
> prepared for if I attempt to use it as a shared library.

Provided you 1) ensure that your application does not install an older
version, and 2) doesn't install a version that is less capable, or has
fewer features enabled than the original one, then the current version
1.2.x -is- installed as a shared library on many platforms.

apr-1-config lets you determine these details of the current installation.

Right now apr and apr-1 are commonly installed as system libraries.  The
trouble would come in if you have a build that is gpl-ed (by including
gdbm support, for example) and you rebuild without that support.  Now,
if one of your APR apps supported it, you just broke a different app :)

That said, feel free to use it either in your own project's lib or on the
few platforms which support it already, as a system lib.

When we 'break it' significantly - and it's no longer binary compatible,
it will become libapr-2.so and gain a apr-2-config script :)  So you
shouldn't ever have problems moving forwards, I suspect that warning is
reasonably out-of-date.