On Wed, 14 Jun 2000, Clarence Verge wrote:
> Ifj. Danko Miklos wrote:
> >
> > This is not really a bug-report:
> >
> > In the docs kernel2.2 listed as required, but it does work for me
> > with kernel-2.0.38. I hope this is not a bug :)))
>
> I hope so to.
> This is the kernel that Dragonlinux 0.76 is using.
Well, kernels are more or less binary compatible, but Linux applications
are usually dynamicaly linked, and major libraries are not so binary
compatible as kernels.
Linux should be called rather GNU/Linux, because it is set of utilities
and libraries written as part of GNU movement, which runs atop of Linux
kernel.
Linux kernel 2.2.x is currently cca 600 KB big.
GNU libc version 2.1 is more then 4 MB big - well, it includes debugging
info, but without it, it would be still more than 1 MB, I guess.
So calling Linux rather "GNU/Linux" would be really fair.
BTW, dynamic linking is not as bad idea as it may seem to long-time DOS
user, who got used to "one directory per application" scheme... of course,
full component-oriented system would be better than system with dynamic
libraries, and dynamic libraries should be upgraded as seldom as possible,
so people can really on certain OS distribution for at least few years.
But dynamic library versioning is definitely more advanced in Linux than
in Windows:
- there are symlinks libname.so -> libname.so.N -> libname.so.N.nn, which
is pretty good scheme for binary compatibility. Unfortunately, programmers
like to change symbol names and data types between versions :-(
- ld (GNU dynamic linker) reports exact version of required library, and
exact name of missing symbol, and it allows searching of alternative path
(enviroment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH). It is very powerful, but very hard
to learn and use correctly.
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