[Qgis-developer] grass provider linking weirdness

[William Kyngesburye]

On May 30, 2011, at 10:37 AM, William Kyngesburye wrote:

>> grassprovider.cpp was linked into both the library and the provider.  Now it's
>> only in the provider and the provider is also linked to the plugin as it needs
>> some methods from the provider.
>> 
>> What's the problem on mac with that?
> 
> It just seems logically and organizationally wrong: providers and plugins are modules that QGIS loads, not libraries that the system linker loads as required by binaries.  If all of the grass provider was in the library before, why not just leave it only in the library instead and drop the provider?  Is there a requirement to have a provider?  Otherwise, move the provider to lib/.
> 
> The Mac issue is that the install processing adjusts the internal linking paths for the Mac app package organization.  It does all *.so files in plugins and *.dylib files in lib, so I'll have to make a special case to do the one *.dylib in the plugins folder.

Is the provider as a library (linked by the plugin) meant to be *also* loaded as a module?  Maybe some initialization that happens as a module but not as a library?  If that's the case, there is another problem: the plugin loading code only loads .so files, even on OS X (.so is the standard module extension for OS X), and libraries on OS X are .dylib, so it will not be loaded as a module.

-----
William Kyngesburye <kyngchaos*at*kyngchaos*dot*com>
http://www.kyngchaos.com/

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