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[Walter Dnes]

On Fri, Nov 12, 2004 at 02:17:13PM -0800, Lloyd D Budd wrote

> > Or you
> > can compile programs to all use the same shared libraries.  In that case,
> > you're down to lowest-common-denominator builds.  And you *MUST* have
> > the same or almost the same critical libraries as the machine the
> > software was built on.
> Well , in some ways this is the point of a distribution .
> All programs using the same well tested "libraries" .  The
> nature of OSS -- and demonstrated by Gentoo -- is also that
> lowest-common-denominator is often easy to make "high" .

  The PC myth... they all look alike to programs.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.

  If you want a distro to work on 99.9% of X86's you build for i386,
without optimizations.  If you're willing to forget about 386's and
486's, you can build for i586's, like Mandrake.  Going to i686 breaks
on early Pentiums and, more importantly, AMD K6 cpus.  And there are
quite a few linux-hobbyists running AMD cpus.  And we haven't even begun
to talk about the really fun optimiztions like "MMX" and "3DNOW" which
may be vendor-specific.

  For everybody who's whining about building in optimizations X, Y, and
Z to speed up their machine, there's someone who doesn't want one or
more of them because code with those optimizations will *NOT* run on
their machine.  If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself.
Given, for example, 8 possible flags to turn on/off in the compile,
we're talking 2^8 = 256 possible versions of *JUST ABOUT EVERY PROGRAM
THAT RUNS ON LINUX*.  Who do you think is going to produce 256
highly-tuned binaries "just right" so there's something for everybody's
machine, for free?  And imagine new users trying to figure out which
version to download.

  This is one place where Apple has an advantage over the Intel world.
You're looking at a few hardware combos, which Apple strictly controls.
If Apple ported its OS to Intel cpus, it would crap out just like Linux,
and especially Windows, on thousands of allegedly "compatable", cheap,
no-name parts obtained from supplier-du-jour.  Even BIOS's are radically
different.  And please don't get me started on Compaq, and their stupid
hidden partition with half the BIOS on disk.  I bet you thought that
went away with the demise of EISA.  I wonder how Apple's OS would react
to that.

> > This is where "DLL-hell" comes from.  The shared DLL model creates
> > dependencies; doesn't matter if it's Windows or linux.
> I thought different library versions can often co-exist under Linux --
> o , that is obvious because of how Gentoo "works" ;-)

  Yes, they can co-exist, thanks to Gentoo slots.  But you're defeating
the whole purpose of *SHARED* DLL's by having multiple versions on disk
and in memory.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
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