Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> On 30.04.2009, at 23:22, Mariano Martinez Peck wrote:
> 
>>     However, you can of course manually do the "linking" step - in the
>>     ffi function declarations, use "libopendbx.so.1" as module instead
>>     of just "opendbx". This will then only work on Linux of course,
>>     since other Unix platforms use different schemes of versioning
>>     libraries.
>>
>>
>> Indeed. That's why I don't want to change the module name.
> 
> Well, you can also automate this "pseudo-linking". When starting up, 
> just patch the right module name for the current platform into all the 
> FFI declarations. That's how the OpenGL FFI bindings in Croquet work ...

The way this is done is purely for historical reasons (and an 
*extremely* bad example that should not be taught to anyone). The Right 
Way to do this is to have a subclass of ExternalLibrary and implement 
the class-side method #moduleName along the lines of:

MyLibrary class>>moduleName
   "Answer the module name to use for this library"
   Smalltalk platformName = 'Win32' ifTrue:[^'MyLibrary32.dll'].
   Smalltalk platformName = 'unix' ifTrue:[
      "check various locations and versions"
      #('/usr/lib/libMyLibrary.so'
        '/usr/lib/libMyLibrary.so.1'
        '/usr/lib/libMyLibrary.so.2'
        '/usr/share/libMyLibrary.so.1'
        '/usr/share/libMyLibrary.so.2') do:[:location|
           (FileDirectory fileExists: location) ifTrue:[^location].
      ].
      ^self error:'MyLibrary is not installed'
    ].

etc.

Cheers,
   - Andreas