Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 17, 2015 11:19 UTC (Sat) by ms_43 (subscriber, #99293)
In reply to: Fedora opens up to bundling by HenrikH
Parent article: Fedora opens up to bundling

Wow, I'd call installing crap like libeay32.dll in a global system directory an act of sabotage by whatever application did that.

OpenSSL is not ABI compatible between even micro versions, but they all build a "libeay32.dll" and a "ssleay32.dll".

In the Win32 library search order, the system32 directory *precedes* %PATH%, so this is going to *break* unrelated applications that bundle their own libeay32.dll, if it's located in a different directory than the executable.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 18, 2015 2:42 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Microsoft got tired of this eventually, so now System32 is heavily virtualized. Each legacy application gets its own view of it, with 64-bit and 32-bit applications getting different views.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 20, 2015 22:21 UTC (Tue) by javispedro (guest, #83660) [Link] (1 responses)

Not each legacy application, just every user sees a different copy of it. I.e. it's like a unionfs where writes (which would otherwise be blocked by perms) go to the per-user overlay. (In addition to the 32/64 duality)

In Windows it would be completely impossible to do any sensible "per-application" thing. How do you even determine which executables are part of each application?

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 20, 2015 23:24 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

I'm afraid it's per _application_. Newer applications use manifests (either embedded or standalone) which redirect DLLs to side-by-side directories. Microsoft also does some magic tricks - it uses a bunch of heuristics to detect that a legacy installer is running and redirects its libraries away from System32.

Yeah, it's extra-ugly but works.