“Shared libraries are not a good thing in general”

Re:“Shared libraries are not a good thing in general” by bch on Sunday May 02, 2021 @03:52AM (#27013175)

I think none of those (at least two, nearly surely) might qualify for that exemption. On the vast majority of systems I bet libcurl, for example, is probably linked against by 1 other piece of software - curl(1). “Really useful” isn’t the qualifier here. I bet ~same for libssh. dbus and gnutls I’d have to see more examples to understand.

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Re:“Shared libraries are not a good thing in general” by throwaway525142 on Sunday May 02, 2021 @04:28AM (#27013349)

I think you misunderstand how widely used libcurl is. On Arch Linux, it has 291 reverse dependencies: https://archlinux.org/packages/core/x86_64/curl/.

It is e.g. used by git, cargo (Rust's package manager) and cmake (C++ build system). It's literally installed on 99.99% of all Arch Linux systems: https://www.archlinux.de/packages/core/x86_64/curl.

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Re:“Shared libraries are not a good thing in general” by ahartmetz on Sunday May 02, 2021 @04:48AM (#27013453)

I think that the kind of "knowledge" you are correcting is informing much of the discussion here. And it seems like the motivation is "I want to make MY thing as easy to ship as possible!".

There are hundreds of binaries in a Linux system and no one wants to rebuild all of them when an important library is updated.

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Re:“Shared libraries are not a good thing in general” by CRConrad on Sunday May 02, 2021 @07:22AM (#27014228)

> There are hundreds of binaries in a Linux system and no one wants to rebuild all of them when an important library is updated.

Oh, Idunno... How certain are you of this, and why?

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Re:“Shared libraries are not a good thing in general” by pdkl95 on Sunday May 02, 2021 @03:34PM (#27018239)

VERY certain

    $ find /{,usr/}{,s}bin/ -maxdepth 1 -type f \
      | wc -l
    5616

    $ du -h --total --no-dereference \
      $(find /{,usr/}{,s}bin/ -maxdepth 1 -type f) \
      | tail -n 1
    1.3G    total

That's with shared libraries and debug symbols stripped. If I upgrade libc, why would I want to also waste a massive amount of time rebuilding all 5616 binaries?

Of course, even if we ignore the insane buld time, I don't have the source for some of those binaries, and in a few cases the source no longer exists. In those cases, should I be forced to only use those programs with the (buggy) versions of the libraries they were originally built with?

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Re:“Shared libraries are not a good thing in general” by scatters on Sunday May 02, 2021 @07:40PM (#27020096)

1.3 GB? It's 2021, I can read that from SSD into memory in less than the blink of an eye. Hard disk is fast and cheap enough that it's worth keeping builds around to incremental rebuild against new libraries. Also, typically tests require a build tree, and you are going to rerun tests on the relinked binaries, aren't you?

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Re:“Shared libraries are not a good thing in general” by bch on Sunday May 02, 2021 @04:00PM (#27018490)

You’re absolutely right, I did misunderstand :/

Colour me a bit surprised, and corrected.

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Re:“Shared libraries are not a good thing in general” by colonwqbang on Sunday May 02, 2021 @04:50AM (#27013465)

Libcurl is the only sane way I know to access the web from a C or C++ environment. I expect that most C programs needing to do web requests will link in libcurl.

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