> You can say that you can solve these problems by providing library
> compat packages, but that's really just moving the bloat out to
> another file; you'd need these packages pretty much all the
> time, unless you're doing a clean install.

In other words: you have the extra bloat around on your system for
exactly as long as you need it.

If you're doing a clean install, and installing all up-to-date
applications, you don't need the bloat.

If you're still using old applications, yeah, you have it around, but
it's only eating memory when you're using the old applications.  When
you get rid of the old applications (upgrade, recompile, whatever),
eventually you no longer need the compat libs.


If you put compatibliity versions in the library, and never bump
library major versions, then you will for all time have that
compatibility bloat in your library.  In addition, it won't even
likely be 'localized bloat,' it'll be 50 or 300 bytes per chunk,
spread out throughout the whole library, and so will likely end up
eating memory (because all of the compat stuff won't live in their own
pages in the library, i.e. they'll end up living the same pages as
'good' bits).



cgd