[Gllug] Linux on Desktop

[Nix]

On 7 Feb 2007, Tethys spake thusly:
> Nix writes:
>
>>This is very close to what symbol versioning provides for e.g. glibc. I
>>just wish more library authors other than glibc used it.
>
> You're assuming that said library authors even know what symbols are,
> let alone understanding symbol versioning.

I'd hope authors of shared libraries like, say, libpng or OpenSSL (*how*
many times can one library break binary compatibility?) would start to
use it.

But OpenSSL comes with a whole slew of horrible macro-related problems
of its own :(

> No, I haven't really been explaining run time linker behaviour to
> someone at work today, honest! It turns out that this is the first
> time he'd ever written a program that compiled down to native code.

I did a hack involving use of DT_GROUP and DT_FILTER to force two
nearly-compatible shim shared libraries to work together at work
today. Started out by explaining it, recalibrated my sights several
times and when I found myself having to explain what shared libraries
were I'm afraid I gave up. :/

> Sigh. Is this what Universities are churning out these days (he has
> a degree in computer science)?

Still, he knows what a VM is. (It's something written by Sun which lets
you run code *you* wrote rather than code Sun wrote!)

Still I did get a burst of satisfaction when I managed to explain to
someone at work how valgrind worked. If they can grasp the principles of
that wizardly hack they can't be totally knowledge-free.

-- 
`In the future, company names will be a 32-character hex string.'
  --- Bruce Schneier on the shortage of company names
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