[Bf-committers] TIFF support - submitted patch #2995

Jonathan Merritt j.merritt at pgrad.unimelb.edu.au
Wed Sep 7 13:12:38 CEST 2005


Ton Roosendaal wrote:

> Or, would it be possible to dynamically link  with it, like for yafray 
> or quicktime now, based on dlopen linking (so  no dependency)...?


I can see Yafray using the PIL_dynlib_* functions (Blender's wrappers 
around dlopen() and friends), but it doesn't look like the QuickTime 
stuff does.  It looks like QuickTime inclusion is controlled purely by 
the build system.

This might be a stupid question, but: How is QuickTime dynamically 
loaded?  The only thing I can think of is that perhaps QuickTime itself 
contains a small "static stub" library that will dynamically load the 
real library and hook-up all the symbols at run time. ... Kind of like a 
shared library that's allowed to fail.  Is that what's going on?  If so, 
is there any way to do this automatically with, say, libtiff? :-)

Or is this just confusion between the terms "dynamic library" and 
"shared library"?
Dynamic library: loaded with dlopen() at some point during runtime; *.so 
may be optional.
Shared library: set up at compile time; program fails to run without 
access to the *.so.

It shouldn't be too much effort to dynamically load the required 
functions from libtiff, using Blender's PIL_dynlib_* functions.  If this 
is the way to do it, I'll hopefully have the patch for that finished 
before the end of next weekend.

Jonathan Merritt.

PS - I found this documentation on libraries:
    http://www.dwheeler.com/program-library/Program-Library-HOWTO/t1.html
Do people know of a better resource?



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