On Mon, 26 Aug 2002, Jason R Thorpe wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 27, 2002 at 02:38:56AM +0200, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> 
>  > My point is basically that Unix as such don't know anything about shared
>  > libraries. Instead you have a piece of code linked into your binary, which
> 
> Right, nor should it.  It would simply be inappropriate to have potentially
> many linkers in the kernel (one for each ABI you might support in userland).

That's a way of arguing that it's a good thing.
I wasn't making an argument about that. I was just claiming that the whole
dynamic library implementation in Unix is a hack added long after the
initial design was made. It wasn't though about, and not included in Unix
from the beginning. Nor have it ever been addressed from a system point of
view. Instead someone came up with a hairy scheme where each program
itself was responsible for implementing the dynamic libraries.

I won't go into the question wether it's a good or bad design. It has it's
merits, but it's still a hack.

I also happen to have opinions about the hack for handling wildcards,
among other things, but do you really want us to argue about religion?

I consider a whole lot of things in Unix as being hacks. But Unix spread
and flourish with them, while OSes that I like have gone to a silent
grave. :-)

	Johnny

Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt@update.uu.se           ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol