Re: spatial stuff detail

[Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandrakesoft com>]

Le mer 24/09/2003 à 10:51, Ross Burton a écrit :
> On Wed, 2003-09-24 at 00:12, Guido Schimmels wrote:
> > Because those 50M is not the download size of the fixed apps, but  
> > results from the chain reaction triggered by the uncounted cross- 
> > dependencies of Debian's messed up dependency graph. That is one of the  
> > reasons for the increasing popularity of source based distros. Of  
> > course source based distros are like waving the white flag and admit  
> > that Linux is doomed a geek toy.
> 
> Erm, what are you smoking?
> 
> If the ABI of a library changes, everything which links to it needs to
> be recompiled.  Having a source-based distribution may cure cancer and
> end world poverty, but it will not remove the fact that if a library
> changes ABI, all applications which link to it need to be recompiled.
> 
> Of course, ABI changes don't happen often.  For example, a new zlib was
> released not too long ago (last year?) which fixed a major security
> hole. This did not change ABI. This did not force a recompile of all
> software which would have lead to a huge download. It resulted in a
> small download for a single library, which fixed all software.  Try
> doing that with a library which is contained inside each and every
> AppFolder you have installed.

Well, it was two years ago and it was a major pain for a lot of
distributors because many projects were having their own copy of zlib in
their projects (in our kernel, I think there was 3 copy of it...). In
fact, this security bug helped because it highlighted all apps which
were compiled statically with zlib..

-- 
Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandrakesoft com>
Mandrakesoft