OT: Next Time you sing happy birthday

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

On Tuesday 14 August 2007 23:13, JoeHill wrote:
> Ian Petersen left a post-it on the fridge:
> > On 8/14/07, James Knott <james.knott-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > > JoeHill wrote:
> > > > Empires do not require an enemy to become pretty much ignored
> > > > and ineffective. They do it to themselves every time.
> > > > Beautiful thing to watch.
> > >
> > > http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2168426,00.asp?kc=EWRSS031
> > >29TX1K0000616
> >
> > The general "feel" of that article is nice, but the details in it
> > are rather questionable.  From the article:
> >
> > "[In a Linux-based OS there is] no such thing as a DLL, which
> > Crawford described as the second most evil thing in Windows
> > behind ActiveX."
> >
> > Doesn't an .so serve the same purpose as a DLL?  I don't know
> > much about DLLs, so there could be subtle differences in purpose
> > that I'm unaware of, but I though DLL stood for "dynamic link
> > library", or something similar, and is therefor basically the
> > same as an .so (shared object, right?).
>
> Functionally, they are very similar, ie. they provide functionality
> that is 'shared' by different applications. In practical terms,
> they are not even remotely the same thing. For one thing, there is
> absolutely no consensus whatsoever among developers that produce
> Windows applications in terms of what is contained in them.
> Installing an application from one vendor will very often give you
> a libray which contains code that is not only redundant and
> duplicated many many times on your system (bloat, confusion), but
> may even go so far as to conflict with a library installed with
> software from another vendor (lockups, crashes, and a security
> nightmare). Nice.
>
> Contrast this with shared objects on the FOSS side: as far as I
> know, there is almost zero probability that my install of imlib2.so
> will conflict with anything else, because most every open source
> developer on the planet knows exactly what is contained in
> imlib2.so, and so they have no need to bother including anything
> with their software which might duplicate, or worse, conflict with,
> the code in imlib2.so. In fact, so far as I know, I have never ever
> installed an application on my system which came with its own bunch
> of .so files. They rely on package management to make sure that my
> system will have all the required shared objects in order to
> function properly.

From: 
<http://www.modpython.org/pipermail/mod_python/2005-May/018166.html>

"Thus it is an environment issue related to compilation of the 
software and not a bug in any. Ie., Win32 DLL hell on Linux."

I have had to deal with this issue while deploying Django apps on the 
same server being used to serve Drupal.

glibc version issues are also "fun".
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

<http://dinamis.com>
+1 416-410-3326
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