On Mar 11, 2009, at 1:47 PM, Daniel J. Luke wrote:
On Mar 11, 2009, at 4:04 PM, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
More to the point, there are already scenarios today (and far more
in FreeBSD's ports collection, where the efforts to address this
have taken on an increasingly desperate and hacky nature) where you
simply cannot have two desired ports installed at the same time due
to conflicting, mutually-exclusive dependencies. Port Foo depends
on library Bar, version X. Port Blah depends on library Bar,
version Y. X and Y are incompatible with eachother, and Foo cannot
be easily ported to Bar-Y, just as Blah cannot be easily ported to
Bar-X (we're talking about some old software in many situations,
where there's just no one available to fix things "correctly" by
adapting to the latest revision of Bar).
or port foo could just statically link to version X of the library
and port blah can statically (or dynamically) link to version Y.
(the build process for port foo could even build the old version X
lib).
That wouldn't work as a general rule, since back when "foo" was
created, X would also likely be the "latest and greatest" and, of
course, you would want to ship that as a .dylib since shipping it as a
static archive would mean that every client embedded a copy of X
within itself, leading to bloated memory consumption and no
opportunity to ever update X in-place for security reasons, as
previously discussed. This is why static archives are generally
discouraged on MacOSX - you want the extra level of indirection in
fulfilling the API contract.
I don't really want every version of every library on my system
available for things to link to. Even if we somehow only track ABI
changes, I still probably don't want every ABI version around.
Maybe *you* don't, but anyone who needs every library on their system
available for other reasons, and does a halfway reasonable job of
garbage collection once in awhile, is not going to share that opinion
at all.
- Jordan
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