Re: Unexec gurus?

[Jim Blandy <jimb at red-bean dot com>]

> Just to see if I understand this correctly: the initialization
> problems goes away if using only static linking (ie. no shared
> libraries)?

The problem I described goes away if you link statically, yes.  Under
static linking, there's no distinction at run-time between .o files
that come from your build directory and .o files that come from
libraries.

There will certainly be other problems which won't go away if you link
statically.  For example:

- You'll need to make sure you set your time zone correctly --- on
  some systems, the library caches the value of the TZ environment
  variable on startup, or the first time a time zone function is called.

- If you call any getpwent or gethostbyname functions before dumping,
  those will sometimes cache a file descriptor connecting you to an
  NIS server.  You'll need to figure out how to kick that into
  re-opening its connection.

- There's probably similar lossage with locales.  On some systems.
  You can't tell without looking at the implementation.

And so on, blah blah blah.  For a complete catalog, just look at the
startup code in GNU Emacs.

Unexec isn't buggy itself --- it's just a bug emitter.  Bugs fly out
of it in all directions and break whatever piece of code they hit.