From: eric@tantalus.nrl.navy.mil (Eric Youngdale) Subject: Re: Unsharable Shared Libraries. Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1993 15:57:39 GMT
In article <5083@seti.inria.fr> julien@incal.inria.fr (Julien Maisonneuve) writes:
>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.
You misunderstand how linux works. An executable that is linked to
libc.4.1, libc.4.2 or libc.4.3 will all work with libc.so.4.3 - there is no
need to keep old versions of libc around to run old executables (Note that
a program linked to 4.3 will not run with 4.1).
The old X libraries were not set up in this way, so you did have to
keep old versions of the library around, but with the new DLL libraries it will
be possible to slip in new sharable libraries and delete the old ones when a
new X is released.
-Eric
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