Re: How CLSQL finds and loads foreign libraries

Edi Weitz wrote:
> Due to lack of time I'm not subscribed to cmucl-devel anymore but I
> wonder if it's not worthwhile for CMUCL to revert to the old
> behaviour.  It's certainly a good thing to be able to load a library
> the way virtually any other programming language can do it...

I'd be reluctant to push for a reversion of behavior that has been
undefined. (Though I do understand your purpose) For example, I had
*assumed* that Allegro would try to load shared libraries for the
directories that the kernel had configured with ldconfig and
/etc/ld.so.conf. But, I found that Allegro did not search those
directories, but through experimentation found that Allegro would load
from /usr/lib/. For CMUCL, it's not only never been documented that
CMUCL would look for shared libraries for FSVO "system locations", but
also what those locations would be.

Disclaimers aside, I think would be helpful for CMUCL to export an
interface to load shared libraries (sys::load-object-file is not
exported, of course) and also to document and support a search for
shared libraries in a manner consistent with the OS handling of shared
libraries.

Kevin