Re: [9fans] acme, rio workalike available in plan 9 ports

[ron minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>]

On Wed, 21 Apr 2004, boyd, rounin wrote:

> > how long does it take to recompile the entire system if you have a bug in
> printf?

wrong question. On many of these later systems, as I said, app .o is tied
to lib .so. So it doesn't matter if you just rebuild the library -- the 
app may not be fixed because it is tied to (e.g.) GLIBC 2.0 versioned 
symbols, and the fixed symbols are later versions. So you replace a broken 
libc.so with a new one, and guess what? not all your apps are fixed. You 
have to replace the apps anyway, so they'll use the right symbols. 

Maybe I'm painting a grimmer picture than reality, but that's the way it 
looks to me.

The old goal of shared libs was to provide an implementation-independent
interface to a set of functions in a possibly changing library. It's
pretty hard to square this goal with the idea of versioned symbols. I've
seen cases on some OSes where the vendor told you (to fix a bug) to update
the shared library and all the apps -- although the type signature of the
fixed function in question had not changed. That's weird.

A rebuild of all of gnubin is a rather long process. Best way to find out 
how long is to build a gentoo linux system. It's interesting.

ron