From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-Id: <200006221319.JAA25125@small-gods.mit.edu>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] SO for plan9?
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 22 Jun 2000 08:49:11 EDT."
             <001001bfdc48$43bed880$9e096887@union1.nj.home.com>
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 09:19:20 -0400
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
Topicbox-Message-UUID: c75c75c2-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025

> there is an article on what they call "DLL hell".  It debunks most
> of the supposed advantages of dlls and talks about all the problems
> they have caused.

By coincidence, I've read this article.  The primary problems
discussed in the article stem from the fact that Windows applications
often ship with replacement DLLs for system libraries.  This concept
is totally foreign to most Unix developers (even commercial Unix
developers, in my experience).

I have to wonder how much of the anti-shared-library sentiment on this
list comes from Windows experience.  Unix-based systems have been
using shared libraries with reasonable success for ages.  I'm sure
that it's more elegant if you can just use IPC or write small code,
but Plan 9 accomplished that goal at the expense of backward
compatibility with its predecessor, something a successful operating
system can probably never do.

(Incidentally, the person who thought you could trivially get a root
shell on Solaris using LD_LIBRARY_PATH should do his homework better.
The run-time loader unsets the LD_* variables for setuid programs on
all Unix systems supporting shared libraries; it's just too obvious of
a security hole to have been left open.)