Re: Modules dependencies RE: PATCH: zftp/tcp abstraction

[Zefram <zefram@fysh.org>]

Andrej Borsenkow wrote:
>To make it work in general every module needs a standard function, let's
>call it dep_, that is autogenerated out of moddeps and called before module
>is attempted to be loaded to register dependencies.

Problem is you can't call that function without loading the module, and
you can't successfully load the module until you've got that information.
If there were an easy solution we'd have implemented it as soon as we
came up with the module system.

Basically we want to be able to read the list of dependencies before
we load the module.  The best idea I came up with was to concatenate
the list onto the end of the shared object file -- so it can be read
from the file before we invoke the dynamic linker -- but in the general
case this could interfere with the shared object file format enough that
the dynamic linker might reject it.  Another possibility is to put the
dependency list in a separate file, and install the two files (shared
object and dependency list) whenever we want to install the module.

Neither of my solutions is completely satisfactory, but it now seems that
we are making sufficient use of interdependent modules that we need some
form of implicit dependencies.

-zefram