PSARC 2008/406 Objective Caml System and LablGTK

[Frank Che]

I observed the offline discussion between John and the project team on 
this issue. Now the discussion is closed and John is OK with the project 
team's explanation. So I would like to post a summary of the information 
provided by the project team here. If any one has any concerns on 
integrating these ".a' files with this project, please let the project 
team know by Oct 10th.

Thanks,
Frank.

Summary of information provided by the project team:

The OCaml compiler provides two types ".a" files. One type, which is 
named like lib*.a, are called 'C stub library'. They could be used by 
the developers when they make function calls to standard C functions in 
their code. For this type of ".a' files, there are corresponding dynamic 
library files and the dynamic library files are used by default.

The other type, which covers all other ".a' files that do not have the 
'lib' prefix, are called 'OCaml compilation units'. They are used by the 
developers when they make function calls to functions provided by the 
OCaml compiler. For this type of '.a' files, there is no corresponding 
dynamic library files in the latest OCaml release (3.10.2) that the 
project team is going to integrate now. Based on input from the 
community, corresponding dynamic library files may be provided in future 
release of OCaml (3.11).

The project team will integrate all these ".a" files in this project. In 
the future, when new release of OCaml is available in the community, the 
project team will follow up to integrate the new release.


John Plocher wrote:
> Frank Che wrote:
>> This project need to integrate a few static library files (*.a). 
>
> In general, the library policy and the patch/update architecture 
> supported
> by the linker require the use of shared objects and not static libs.
>
> Please provide more info as to why you must provide .a files instead 
> of following the library best practice/policies.  Without an obvious 
> "duh",
> this is probably reason enough for this case to be derailed.
>
> http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/arc/policies/libraries/
>
>  -John