*BSD News Article 16551


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development
Subject: Re: SHARED LIBRARIES - THE END
Message-ID: <C7nvDE.43y@rokkaku.atl.ga.us>
From: kml@rokkaku.atl.ga.us (Kevin Lahey)
Date: Thu, 27 May 1993 01:12:48 GMT
References: <1993May23.003623.24102@fcom.cc.utah.edu> <1tr05o$qaa@terminator.rs.itd.umich.edu> <1993May24.225014.23425@fcom.cc.utah.edu>
Organization: Geeks-R-Us
Lines: 27

I can't believe people are flaming Pete Chown over this updated version of
the shared library code.  Six months ago there were many authoritative 
statements that this was not the right solution, that the 386BSD community 
was going to do shared libraries the "right" way, and that it was silly to 
go for the short term solution.  Here we are, six months later, and
it seems that the only solution around is an update of the one we
had six months ago.

Should we just wait another six months, with the same sort of progress,
or should we just go ahead and be happy that we have *some* sort of
shared library that we can use now?  Unless we can see some working
code that is much better than Pete's solution, it seems to me that we
oughta just go for it.

I hate to sound strident about this, but it sorta galls that we had all
this big talk so long ago, and seemingly no or little progress towards
the ultimate "shared libraries done right" that was so confidently
predicted.  Why wait again?

386BSD is great, and I sure appreciate all the effort everybody has put
into it.  I just think that this shared library argument is sorta silly.
Why throw out a reasonable, if sub-optimal, implementation of something
we need?  If the Linux folks can upgrade their shared libraries, why
can't we?

Kevin
kml@rokkaku.atl.ga.us