[cl-gd-devel] Premature loading of GD library can cause problems

[Alain Picard]

Dear all,

At the end of init.lisp, there is a line, at toplevel, like so:

(load-gd-glue)

This can cause problems under certain scenarios; e.g. using
Lispworks with a delivered application, on a system different
from where the application was delivered.

What we do, for example, is this:

  - app starts
  - set up some logical translations, from current working directory
    or an environment variable, say XOS_HOME
  - push "XOS:LIBS;" onto the list of *shared-library-directories*
  - call (load-gd-glue) to initalize GD.

Now, in LW 5, this is failing, because in uffi, the call to
load-foreign-library ends up calling

	#+lispworks (fli:register-module module :real-name filename
                                         :connection-style :immediate)

which tries to load the library on a path which does not exist on
the remote host.  This all happens even before the delivered MAIN
function has a chance to run and set things right.  I'm expecting
that LW4 and LW5 are doing something different internally which is
causing this bug (behaviour?) to only manifest now.

I'm not completely clear in my mind who's "fault" this situation is;
I think I can see that SBCL/CMUCL users, who might tend to not deliver
runnable images, but rather the core + fasls, would want the current
behaviour; i.e. loading init.lisp causes the GD library to get loaded,
but it seems onerous to force this choice onto everyone.

For now, I have no choice but to modify my copy of cl-gd to comment
out this line, something I prefer not to do when tracking 3rd party
sources.

Does anybody have an opinion on this situation?  I think I myself,
as library author, would omit the (load-gd-glue) call, and leave that
to users to put in their own files at toplevel if so they wish.

Are there any other "good" solutions?

                                Cheers,
                                Alain Picard


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