Subject: Re: stdio FILE extension
To: Andrew Brown <atatat@atatdot.net>
From: Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@netbsd.org>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 10/25/2001 03:47:11
On Fri, 26 Oct 2001, Andrew Brown wrote:

> >But if we do that, and we provide both new and old versions of the
> >libraries, where is the problem? Already-compiled programs will point to
> >the old libc, and will be using libraries that point to the old libc. New
> >programs will get built pulling in the new libraries, all of which point
> >to the new libc. So where is the problem?
>
> the users would also have to rebuild any libraries that got installed
> via pkgsrc at the same time, otherwise you'd end up with, eg,
> /usr/pkg/lib/libpng.so.1 linked against libc.so.12 while any new
> applications built from pkgsrc would pick up libc.so.13.  the link
> wouldn't fail (afaik), but when you ran the application, it would drag
> in libc.so.13 and libpng.so.1, which would subsequently drag in
> libc.so.12.  which would not be good.

Right. That I get.

I guess one other thing I have in mind is that this won't happen anytime
soon, and I'd hope we have better install tools by the time this happens.
So that, at least for release users, pkgsrc would get updated
automatically. :-)

> bumping the major when you switch execution formats is better, since
> you *can't* use, for example, an a.out library with an elf library,
> but since there's nowhere to go from elf...

Yep. And the fact that different architectures did it at different times.

Take care,

Bill