Re: spatial stuff detail

[John Siracusa <siracusa mindspring com>]

On Sep 21, 2003, at 6:41 PM, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> You are confusing shared libraries with interchangable components.  
> You never, ever repalce teh OS X or Win32 'libc' with another version, 
> for example, but you're quite free to use glibc, dietlibc, etc. w/ 
> Linux.

Isn't libc isn't a shared library?  And there's no reason you can't 
install and use any other libc variants in OS X.

> Likewise, the OS X GUI is there to stay and not replaced.  The Windows 
> GUI is the same way.  yet on Linux, you can use XFree86, another X 
> server, DirectFB, Fresco, etc. And then on top of those, you an run a 
> plain WM, a mini-desktop, or one of several full blown complete 
> destksops liek GNOME, KDE, ROX, XFCE, GNUStep, etc.

You can run X11, KDE, and friends in addition to (or instead of, I 
suppose) the Aqua GUI in OS X.

> Also, the desktops vary a lot.  It *really* makes a difference if you 
> have GNOME2.0 or GNOME2.4 from a development standpoint, since apps 
> written for a later version don't work at all with the previous - the 
> API isn't really 'stable' at all, it's just kept backwards compatible. 
> [...]
>
> Compare this to Linux, UNIX, where we have a metric shitload of 
> varying libraries, toolkits, utility apps, etc., many of which aren't 
> anywhere close to stable in ABI, many of which have different versions 
> that aren't co-installable, none of which can be sanely or easily 
> detected, many of which can be installed or compiled in wholly 
> incompatible ways, etc.
>
> *That's* how Linux is more "pluggable" and Windows/OS X more 
> "monolithic."

That sounds like "less stable", not "more pluggable", IMO.

-John