When building extensions you need to link with libruby, if you don't
have a shared library then libruby.a will get linked in...

So if you have libruby.so, your extensions will be smaller as it uses
the shared library instead of statically linking in libruby.a.

Having said that if you have just a couple of extensions, then it
doesn't matter much, but if you have 10 or 20-plus extensions loaded
concurrently, then a shared library saves quite some memory.


Pixel wrote:
> 
> Wai-Sun Chia <waisun.chia / msa.dec.com> writes:
> 
> > Thanks Pixel, I needed that.
> > Perhaps you can add "enable-shared" into your next ruby-package in
> > Mandrake?
> > I'm sure a lot of Ruby hackers will appreciate that, especially when one
> > is building extensions...
> 
> i don't understand the need of enable-shared. It sure doesn't help normal ruby
> extensions?

-- 
Wai-Sun "Squidster" Chia
Unix/Web Developer/RHCE
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