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> [...] Having said that, I do wish the average linux distro still statically linked everything in /bin and /sbin. It was nice to still be able to administrate

> [...] Having said that, I do wish the average linux distro still statically linked everything in /bin and /sbin. It was nice to still be able to administrate the system even when the dynamic libraries were hosed. [...] This argument came up back when Solaris 10 was in development and the project to get rid of static link archives for system libraries came up (search for Solaris "unified process model"). The disposition of this argument was that if your libraries are damaged (e.g., someone unlinked them or renamed them out of the way, or maybe ld.so.1 itself), well, the dependent utilities in /bin and /sbin themselves could have been damaged too, so you can't know the extent of the damage, and it's not safe to continue -- you have to use boot media to repair the damage, or reinstall. And, of course, the packaging system has to be safe, but that's not a lot to expect of a packaging system (is it??). To my knowledge there were no subsequent customer calls about this.

jart 6y ago
Sometimes solutions give rise to new categories of issues, and it's difficult to connect the dots to the root cause. If you believe dynamic linking hasn't introduced an even broader array of difficulties for C coders needing to support both, then please read Ulrich Drepper's DSO tutorial which gives a pretty good rundown: https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/m/a/1/e/dsohowto.pdf https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/m/a/1/e/dsoho... If I remember correctly, it was largely SCO Group that pushed UNIX vendors back in the 1990's to switch to a WIN32 linking model. I didn't find their arguments that compelling, to be honest, due to not citing alternatives considered.
- lokedhs 6y ago
  Unrelated told your post, but please don't suggest that SCO Group was involved. The company in the 90's was simply SCO, and was a pretty cool company. SCO Group was renamed as such from Caldera in the early 00's and was the people suing Linux users for copyright infringement.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Dynamic linking was already common outside UNIX (Amiga, Xerox, Atari, MacOS, MS-DOS overlays and extenders, IBM and Unisys mainframes, Oberon/Lilith) so what does Win32 even have to do with it?

jart 6y ago

Sometimes solutions give rise to new categories of issues, and it's difficult to connect the dots to the root cause. If you believe dynamic linking hasn't introduced an even broader array of difficulties for C coders needing to support both, then please read Ulrich Drepper's DSO tutorial which gives a pretty good rundown: https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/m/a/1/e/dsohowto.pdf https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/m/a/1/e/dsoho... If I remember correctly, it was largely SCO Group that pushed UNIX vendors back in the 1990's to switch to a WIN32 linking model. I didn't find their arguments that compelling, to be honest, due to not citing alternatives considered.

lokedhs 6y ago
Unrelated told your post, but please don't suggest that SCO Group was involved. The company in the 90's was simply SCO, and was a pretty cool company. SCO Group was renamed as such from Caldera in the early 00's and was the people suing Linux users for copyright infringement.
pjmlp 6y ago
Dynamic linking was already common outside UNIX (Amiga, Xerox, Atari, MacOS, MS-DOS overlays and extenders, IBM and Unisys mainframes, Oberon/Lilith) so what does Win32 even have to do with it?