Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
On Thu, 8 Feb 2007, George Birbilis wrote:
We need a version system.
That's not something "we" need, but which most OS'es need
(and don't
provide, except for hacks like symlinks or different filenames).
Moreover, it doesn't really solve much unless you like having 20
different versions of the same shared library on your system (which
would more or less defeat the purpose of saving space, although it
could still save memory if more than one FPC program is
running at the
same time).
If I understand well what you mean, Vista has versioning of
that kind, you can ask to see older versions of any file and
restore the one you want. A small caveat is that for files
that don't exist currently anymore (deleted) there's no GUI
to get them (or one I haven't spotted yet) and you need to
make a dummy file with same name, then right click it and go
to Properties, then ask for the older versions (there's a
special tab for that on the dialog). Not sure if the Basic
version of Vista has this functionality available (I tried it
with Vista Ultimate)
If you meant having many libs of different version exist side-by-side, .NET
runtime supports it, but Win32 itself doesn't
Most unixes also have it. The point is that it kind of defeats the purpose.
Having 20+ libraries called fpcrtl-xyz.dll (or fpcrtl.so.x.y.z on unixes)
defeats the purpose of a shared library: saving disk and (more importantly)
memory space by factoring out common code.
If we'd know that the fpcrtl.so (or .dll) interface will stay the same in the
next 5 years, it makes sense to distribute this. Since the interface changes
still wildly, it's a bad idea.
Look at Delphi packages: as soon as the interface of a package changes,
you must re-compile all the binaries that use it. The same would be true
for FPC. I can assure you this is a major headache when distributing apps.
Michael.
Is that so hard to use version system for rtl libraries ? I think that
most of Lazarus end users will work with one fpc version and no other.
Lazarus developers still need fpc SVN and here is required a way to fast
rebuild lazarus with fpc rtl which is nothing more that we are doing all
the time now ;-) End users sometimes will need to rebuild lazarus and
fpc also if some critical bugs are fixed in fpc but : is it something
extraordinary ?
Am I missing something ?
Regards
Boguslaw Brandys
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