[2913] in Release_Engineering
layering bites back...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Chris VanHaren)
Thu Aug 13 09:29:05 1992
To: rel-eng@MIT.EDU
Cc: jon@MIT.EDU, tjm@MIT.EDU, nschmidt@MIT.EDU, alexp@MIT.EDU, facdev@MIT.EDU
From: Chris VanHaren <vanharen@MIT.EDU>
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 92 09:28:35 BST
(I'm not sure what the right forum for this is, so we'll start off here.
If anyone has a suggestion for where to go with this, feel free to speak
up.)
We have a problem with the way we layer our stuff on vendors' software.
Specifically, we are losing on the RS/6000.
The problem is this:
Motif 1.1 (and up) applications expect to find a Keysym database file in
/usr/lib/X11 -- actually, Motif doesn't look for it there, this is a
filename hard-coded into Xlib.
On Athena, our compiled Xlib has the path /usr/athena/lib/X11/XKeysymDB
instead, so all the apps that we link here look for it in /usr/athena...
However, third-party apps are typically have Xlibs that expect the file
to be /usr/lib/X11/XKeysymDB, so they lose on the RS/6000, where there
is no link (as there is on the other platforms).
So, in order to fix the problem, there are a few options:
- Get software vendors to supply us with object files, so that we can
link with our own Xlib (and Motif and whatever).
- Edit the binary to make it look somewhere else.
- Install a link from /usr/lib/X11/XKeysymDB to
/usr/athena/lib/X11/XKeysymDB.
My personal preference is the third, since it is the least amount of
work in the long run, however, I am sure that there will be
disagreement. Comments? Questions? Suggestions?
-C.
