On Thu, Dec 15, 2005 at 08:24:54AM -0800, Mr O wrote: > Instead of KDE/Gnome, vi/emacs, beer/soda wars I think > developers should work toward more binary packages. Reduce the > dependencies on shared libs. What else causes more headache and > grief than updating one thing and three others no longer work? > Modern computers certainly don't lack disk space. > > Any pros/cons, thoughts on that?
oh yeah, lots of thoughts on this one, being a package maintainer myself. say there is a serious bug in a commonly used library like libjpeg. if all the binaries on a system are statically linked against libjpeg, then they will all need to be relinked with the fixed libjpeg binary. this is very time consuming, and it's pretty easy to forget to update them all. now, if all your binaries are dynamically linked against libjpeg, and the fix does not change the API/ABI of libjpeg, then simply installing the fixed libjpeg binary will automatically fix all the binaries that use it. note that I qualified the statement above with "does not change the API/ABI". properly created, shared libraries contain all the information needed to know if the ABI/API has changed. this is what the library version numbers are for. more info: http://www.linuxshowcase.org/2000/2000papers/papers/browndavid/browndavid_html/ http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Program-Library-HOWTO/shared-libraries.html unfortunately, many library authors/maintainers either do not understand or ignore this basic feature and do not use proper shared library versioning. this is why updating shared libraries can lead to breakage. of course, the situation is exacerbated when package managers do not take library versioning into account either. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
