* Josh Poimboeuf <jpoim...@redhat.com> wrote:
> > > wouldn't necessarily be a clean split. It would also possibly create
> > > more
> > > room for error for the users of libapi, since there would then be three
> > > config interfaces instead of one.
> >
> > Humm, and now that you talk... libapi was supposed to be just sugar coating
> > kernel APIs, perhaps we need to put it somewhere else in tools/lib/ than in
> > tools/lib/api/?
>
> Ah, I didn't realize libapi was a kernel API abstraction library. Shall we
> put
> it in tools/lib/util instead?
Yay, naming discussion! ;-)
So if this is about abstracting out the (Git derived) command-line option
parsing
UI and help system, 'util' sounds a bit too generic.
We could call it something like 'lib/cmdline', 'lib/options'?
The (old) argument against making too finegrained user-space libraries was that
shared libraries do have extra runtime costs - this thinking resulted in
catch-all
super-libraries like libgtk:
size /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgtk-3.so.0
text data bss dec hex filename
7199789 57712 15128 7272629 6ef8b5
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgtk-3.so.0
But in tools/ we typically link the libraries statically so there's no shared
library cost to worry about. (Build time linking is a good idea anyway, should
we
ever want to make use of link-time optimizations. It also eliminates version
skew
and library compatibility breakage.)
The other reason for the emergence of super-libraries was the high setup cost
of
new libraries: it's a lot easier to add yet another unrelated API to libgtk
than
to start up a whole new project and a new library. But this setup cost is very
low
in tools/ - one of the advantage of shared repositories.
So I think in tools/lib/ we can continue to do a clean topical separation of
libraries, super-libraries are not needed.
Thanks,
Ingo
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