From: geyer@kalliope.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de (Helmut Geyer) Subject: Re: Unsharable Shared Libraries. Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1993 16:41:00 GMT
In article <5083@seti.inria.fr>, julien@incal.inria.fr (Julien Maisonneuve) writes:
|>
|> library with a different version number than the one the application was compiled
|> with.
|>
|> This is a problem because in practise, you always have executables compiled with
|> different versions on your disk. So you have to keep libraries of every version
|> for wich you have an executable, and since libraries are large objects and that
|> there are many of them, it takes up too much disk space.
|> Moreover, if you get a shrink-wrapped executable for which you do not have the
|> right library version (even though you have the latest libraries), you can as
|> well throw it away.
|>
|> The SunOS approach is much better: whenever a new shared library is installed
|> (with ldconfig), whatever its version is, it is seen as the regular library for
|> all executables. You only need to keep one library of each kind around,
|> installing the most recent library ALWAYS works.
|>
|> So, unless I was totally wrong from the start, I would like to know if there is a
|> way to make Linux behave a bit like SunOS, and why it was not designed that way
|> in the first place.
|> Thanks,
|>
|> --
|> _________ Julien.Maisonneuve@inria.fr julien@sor.inria.fr
|> / _ _ _ ...!uunet!inria!corto!julien
|> / /) ' ) ) ) INRIA : 33 (1) 39 63 52 08
|> __/_ // o _ __ / / / _ o _ _ __ __ _ _ _
|> / / (_(_(/_(_(<_/) ) / ' (_(_(_(_/_)_(_)_/) )_/) )_(<_(_(_( \_)-(<_
|> (_/
As I understand it, the Linux shared libraries do just the same. Whenever a new version of a
shared library is installed, all binaries will use this (and usually there are no problems
concerning this - a hooray for all library maintainers, they do a great job !!).
When a completely changed library (i. e. not only a new version, but a new release) is installed
no binaries using the old shared libraries will work with the new ones in SunOS either.
However with SunOS and Open Look come about 40 MB of libraries , so I hope linux will not
go into that direction.
Helmut Geyer