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Red Hat: no desktop products coming

Red Hat: no desktop products coming

Posted Apr 21, 2008 10:45 UTC (Mon) by danhah (guest, #51567)
In reply to: Red Hat: no desktop products coming by mmarq
Parent article: Red Hat: no desktop products coming

I am sure we have similar goals.  All I am saying is lets try to simplify things to where it
just works.  Be it source or binary packages.  Once that happens then lets look at
optimisation.

All that you are saying is a great idea and obviously something to aim for but I think we need
to walk a little faster before flat out sprinting.

Dependency hell will always be possible because if libc changes compatibility then things
break.  It is about acknowledging that and fitting that into a stable system.


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Red Hat: no desktop products coming

Posted Apr 21, 2008 19:11 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

libc isn't going to break, full stop.

However, what *is* a concern is a more general case of something which we 
did see in the last major upgrade. Remember the wtmp format change? 
Remember the GCC exception-handler errors, back when libgcc was always 
statically linked? This is a special case of a more general problem, which 
is that if some library code manages some shared resource, and more than 
one variety of it gets to run in the same address space (as happens with 
static linking, and with differing-soname shared linking), and those 
varieties have different expectations of some shared resource, things will 
break.

Unix doesn't really have a good answer to this other than `soname breaks 
that affect shared libraries that are linked both into libraries and into 
the users of those libraries should force relinking of all those libraries 
at once, or changes of the intermediate libraries' sonames', both of which 
avoid having multiple copies of different versions of the same shared 
libraries in the same address space at once.

Neither of these situations are exactly ideal, but as far as I know 
nobody's thought of a better way. (Has anyone?)

Red Hat: no desktop products coming

Posted Apr 21, 2008 19:46 UTC (Mon) by danhah (guest, #51567) [Link]

Wasn't there a problem with native threads?  and libc.  I remember a whole back some of the
audio guys complaining about a problem with debian but a workaround was to use -ntpl or
something like that.

Interesting thread though, pity there is only 3 people reading it. :)

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