computers

I was the Technical Reviewer for the book Mac for Linux Geeks, from Apress, Inc. by Tony Steidler-Dennison. It was my first time to be a Technical Reviewer, it was interesting, but not something I plan on repeating, it simply took up too much time, with not enough pay. Getting paid by the page is not a good thing.

This is not a book review, I don’t think that I would be a good reviewer, being biased, as I am. Please find reviews elsewhere – although a quick look at amazon shows none there yet, unfortunately.

[EDIT June 22nd 2009] Found a review here http://hants.lug.org.uk/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?BookReviews/MacForLinuxGeeks. It’s the only one I could find.

One of the changes that we made in libtool-1.5.26 and cvs HEAD was to change the archive_expsym_cmds on darwin. With leopard the older method of creating the output and then using nmedit to reduce the exported symbols seems to work, but the dynamic linker then sometimes fails to load the resulting object. Both this apache bug and this gnome bug are fixed by using ld’s -exported_symbols_list flag instead. I am glad the change made it into 1.5.26

Of course the reason that libtool did not use -exported_symbols_list in the first place is that Mac OS X 10.0 and 10.1 do not support it, and nmedit did the job just fine up to 10.5. Apple seems to have allowed nmedit to bitrot, it no longer does the same job that it did in 10.4. Filing a bug that you know in advance is just going to be closed with “use ld’s -exported_symbols_list flag” seems kind of pointless, but I guess I should do it anyway.