On Mon, 2004-02-23 at 18:37, Volker Kuhlmann wrote: > It's accessible to all uni members (sorry, not everyone on this list), > but this > > > http://www.computer.org/software/homepage/2004/s1gei_print.htm > > is the same. > > For example, this does sound a bit odd: > > ... Such restrictions-combined with the possibility of deploying the > same reused element multiple times through different products-can > easily result in incompatible dependencies that are nightmarishly > difficult to track, reconcile, and maintain. By comparison, the > infamous DLL problems of Windows platforms often look downright > simple. > Yes it is hard to see how this argument stands up to much scrutiny as when there are a few levels of complexity in an application's use of DLL's in Windows you often don't have any way of finding out what they are until you run it and find they are missing.
One of the other arguments about forking off code from the main trees of projects and getting locked in still holds for many proprietary libraries. Although you can't rewrite parts of the binary library it's still very easy to lock yourself into the use of a very idiosyncratic interface. This has happened to me where I inherited some code that uses a proprietary TWAIN library. It's going to be very hard to extract myself from that. -- ---------------------------------------------------- Regards, Zane Gilmore (Linux nerd since 1998) ____________________________________________________ Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.:- A.C.Clark ____________________________________________________
