On Mon, Sep 29, 2003 at 09:27:45PM +0100, Philip Hazel wrote:
> On Mon, 29 Sep 2003, Andreas Metzler wrote:
> > > Btw, is there any reason that exim uses a build-in
> > > version of PCRE and not a shared library?
> > I assume because in ancient times pcre was not built as shared
> > library and not installed on many machines, on Debian we apply the
> > patch below to force dynamic linking.
> Correct, but also I did not want people to have to install another
> package in order to install "vanilla" Exim. This was naive of me,
> because I had reckoned without the many different DBM libraries that I
> subsequently learned about...
But you'll find one of those on _every_ system ;-)
Just for reference, the newsreader tin also includes pcre's source
and defaults to static linking but offers the possibility for dynamic
linking via "./configure --with-pcre=/usr
> Another reason was that PCRE has gone through quite a lot of
> development, and in the Exim documentation, regex examples might use
> features of a later release than the one that is installed. Nowadays
> this is probably less likely, as PCRE is currently quite stable.
BTW the so-name also differs between distributions, pcre started building
a shared library with 3.0 and therefore builds libpcre.so.0[1] while
Debian has been shipping pcre as shared library since pcre 1 and is at
libpcre.so.3 [2]. This has no practical implications except for the
fact you cannot run binaries compiled on Debian and linking against
libpcre on RedHat (and vice versa).
Sorry for OT.
cu andreas
[1] PCRE_LIB_VERSION=0:1:0
[2] PCRE_LIB_VERSION=13:0:10 for pcre 4.3.
--
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