Re:“Shared libraries are not a good thing in general”
by captainmuon on Sunday May 02, 2021 @05:59AM
(#27013800)
> You can't have both programs on your system
That's incidental and not by principle, isn't it? You should be able to have a multiple versions of a library installed, and the dynamic linker would pick the appropriate version.
Heck you could even have multiple versions in the same process (if you depend on A and B, and B uses an older version of A internally). Unfortunately I think the current dynamic linker on Linux has a shared namespace for symbols.
I also disagree that it is not useful to be able to update libraries separately. The example that I like to give is a PyGtk app written against an earlier Gtk2. Without modifications, it ran against the very last Gtk2, but now supporting: Newest themes, draggable menubars, better IME, window size grippers, and all kinds of other improvements to Gtk.
In the days of ActiveX (and I realize this is a bad example because in reality you often had breakage), you could update a control and suddenly your app would have new functionality (like being able to read newer file format versions or more options to sort your grids and so on).
That's incidental and not by principle, isn't it? You should be able to have a multiple versions of a library installed, and the dynamic linker would pick the appropriate version.
Heck you could even have multiple versions in the same process (if you depend on A and B, and B uses an older version of A internally). Unfortunately I think the current dynamic linker on Linux has a shared namespace for symbols.
I also disagree that it is not useful to be able to update libraries separately. The example that I like to give is a PyGtk app written against an earlier Gtk2. Without modifications, it ran against the very last Gtk2, but now supporting: Newest themes, draggable menubars, better IME, window size grippers, and all kinds of other improvements to Gtk.
In the days of ActiveX (and I realize this is a bad example because in reality you often had breakage), you could update a control and suddenly your app would have new functionality (like being able to read newer file format versions or more options to sort your grids and so on).