On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 17:06 -0500, Steve Friedman wrote:
On Thu, 22 Feb 2007, Tom Horsley wrote:
On Thu, 22 Feb 2007 10:59:16 -0800 "John P. Fisher" john.fisher@znyx.com wrote:
- I guess if I could wave a wand, I'd have a set of common fundamental
libraries that get shared and maintain compatibility between distro releases, and everything else would be handled by the applications themselves. Maybe this is plain dumb, but it sure would be easier for me...
I'd just have every single app have its very own versions of every library it needs with a reaper that runs around at low priority hard-linking the ones that are identical :-).
Then you've forgotten the zlib security issues of only 5 years ago. A security vulernability was found in a compression library common to over 500 apps. Those that dynamically linked to zlib were patched with a single upgrade; however, large numbers of apps had to be recompiled because they statically linked to zlib. This was a *major* security crisis -- and *many* apps/utilities switched to dynamic linking of zlib (and other common libraries) to avoid this happening again.
As a non-programmer, I'm ignorant of many of the issues involved, but why can't you say: "if you link against an external library, do it dynamically" as a rule of thumb? That way you could replace the library without needing to recompile. Unless you want to state for sure that no-one else will use your library, and not place it in a shared location, that is. -Don