On Sep 18, Loïc Minier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Would someone please sched some light on the origins of this > requirement? If this requirement is only to save memory in most cases, > would it be reasonable to permit building with -fPIC by changing this > "must" in a "should"? Not quite.
Having non-PIC shared libraries is not generally acceptable, but policy does not reflect the current practice. Shared non-relocatable code is acceptable on the few architectures which can support it (i386 and maybe another one) only when there is a positive tradeoff between the speed gained and the RAM wasted. The most common situation where a non-PIC shared library is a good idea is when it contains hand-optimized assembly code. It may still be possible to rewrite it to be relocatable without a major performance loss, but it would probably take a lot of time. And again, very few architectures support non-PIC shared libraries at all: on most they would just not work. Even if a library should be built non-PIC on a specific architecture I see no reason to make it static unless required by the system ABI, which definitely is not the case for i386. (Can somebody refactor this in a policy change proposal please?) -- ciao, Marco
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