[vlc-devel] _pic, $(pic), BUILD_PIC

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

	Hello,

I'm currently trying to make sense out of all this PIC stuff in the 
build system.

As far as I understand, VLC supports three kind of architectures as 
regard Position Independent Code:
- those that don't need it (Windows, and seemingly Darwin),
- those that need it for shared objects (ELF, incl. Linux, *BSD, ...),
- those where we don't support plugins, but only builtins.

It doesn't make sense to build PIC object code in the first or third 
cases. As for the second case, is there any reason why we should still 
build non-PIC code at all ? I presume plugins always have to be built 
as PIC, and vlc itself always as non-PIC; so the difference only 
matters for libvlc. As such, would there be any problem if we removed 
the _pic.a build targets within modules/ ?

In the longer term, should we keep non-PIC (static) libvlc *and* a PIC 
libvlc that seems to needed for the Mozilla plugin ? Can't we just 
remove the non-PIC version ? I am aware that it makes the static 
libvlc.a bigger, but it speeds up compilation, and you should probably 
rather use the shared libvlc if disk/memory space is an issue. Or is 
there any platform needing PIC where shared libvlc sucks ?

As for BUILD_PIC (the automake conditionnal) and $(pic), does anyone 
sees a reason why there values would not match ? $(pic) appears to 
contains pic when PIC is needed for shared objects, and no otherwise. 
But BUILD_PIC is sometimes true when pic is no, which doesn't make 
sense to me.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.simphalempin.com/home/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/vlc-devel/attachments/20060220/080162bc/attachment.sig>