This is about making procps have a proper library but it really is a generic sort of question. Say you are making a library and a program that uses that library. Now at times you may have convience type functions; procps has them for things like escaping command names or allocation different sorts of memory. Both the library and the programs use some of these functions.
Now, there seems only two approaches to this setup. The first is to have the function stay in the library and for the program to call this function, just like all the other library functions. But this means the library has exposed for all other programs that link to it and that doesn’t really make a lot of sense.
The second method is to have the functions defined in both places, perhaps in a file that is linked with the program and the library. That seems to be duplicating the code in two different places. Namespace collision could be a problem but that easily fixed with using some unqiue prefix. I really don’t think having procfs_malloc, procfs_calloc and procfs_strdup are that useful.
I’m sure this sort of problem has been solved elsewhere. Has anyone else come across this? The functions are simple utility type functions such as malloc a block of memory, if there is a problem print to stderr.
