Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 5, 2009 13:30 UTC (Thu) by MisterIO (guest, #36192)
In reply to: Quotes of the week by nye
Parent article: Quotes of the week

Well, you need to support it, don't you? So you need to support it on the kernel, the loader, the c library and many other things related to the elf format. All this to solve a non-existent problem(I agree with Ullrich) or at most to achieve something that could have been achieved at the packaging level with less problems. It'd also make executables(on disk) bloated for each case, instead of having many different normal executables.

Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 5, 2009 14:03 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Not only that, but if your critical components (mount etc, as needed to get your filesystems working) are in traditional ELF, FatELF can be implemented purely in userspace, using binfmt_misc, and a custom FatELF loader.

Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 5, 2009 17:44 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

As opposed to the existing biarch approach, where you need support in
every single app that ever loads plugins. Currently gtk and glib at least
are hardwired to load plugins out of "/.../lib/..." so fail in a biarch
world: lots of distros have to carry around patches for this.

And if gtk/glib can't get it right, why do we expect everyone else to?

Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 5, 2009 20:28 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

So, because gtk/glib can't get it right, we need to scatter fixes throughout the world? This sounds like a cure that's worse than the disease, doesn't it?

Why not just fix gtk/glib?

Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 5, 2009 22:23 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

gtk, and glib, and every other package which ever wants to support plugins
or read things from $libdir, forever.

Does that really seem sane? Normally we have the dynamic linker handle
this stuff for us. Why can't it help here? ('Ulrich rejects everything
without looking at it on dubious personal taste grounds' is not a good
answer.)