On Tue, Jun 05, 2001 at 06:43:22PM -0700, Guy Harris wrote:
> > Code to dynamically load libxml2. (xmlstub.h is all of the types defined
> > in the real libxml2 header files.
>
> ...
>
> > if ((handle = dlopen("libxml2.so", RTLD_LAZY)) == NULL) {
> > fprintf(stderr, "Unable to dlopen \"libxml2\"\n");
> > return (-1);
> > }
>
> Not all platforms on which Ethereal runs have "dlopen()". (HP-UX and
> Windows don't.)
>
> You might want to see whether you can use the GLib gmodule routines
> instead, as they hide that particular platform dependency.
I didn't know that those existed. I'll look at them. I'm trying to do a bit
of code shareing between my application that uses that dictionary and
ethereal.
>
> Note that this won't work on platforms that don't support dynamic
> linking at all, so you'd have to check the HAVE_PLUGINS #define (which
> should probably get renamed to HAVE_DYNAMIC_LINKING).
Will do.
>
> Note also that the names of files containing dynamically-loadable
> modules don't end with ".so" on all platforms; see "plugins_scan_dir()"
> in "epan/plugins.c" for a sleazy hack to determine the suffix.
Will do.
>
> How quickly does libxml load the XML files? Does that significantly
> slow down startup time?
You shouldn't notice a thing. The dictionary is about 2000 lines of xml. It
is parsed instantly. . . . I could profile it with times() if ya want.
My only worry is that libxml doesn't exist at all for Windows. (I have no
idea if there is a port or not) In that case, the dynamic loading would fail,
and it would fall back to a minimal hard-coded dictionary.
