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From: mjr@hussar.dco.dec.com (Marcus J. Ranum)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.ultrix
Subject: Re: SunOS vs. Ultrix comparison
Keywords: SunOS shareable libraries
Message-ID: <1991Jan28.020627.18418@decuac.dec.com>
Date: 28 Jan 91 02:06:27 GMT
References: <1991Jan24.074910.6738@pa.dec.com> <1991Jan24.102601@wsl.dec.com> <22103@netcom.UUCP>
Distribution: comp
Organization: Digital Equipment Corp., Washington Ultrix Resource Center
Lines: 23

fisk@netcom.UUCP (Benjamin Fisk) writes:

>Shared libraries not only save on disk space but they are also
>usefull in cotrolling software releases.  One person can change
>a central library and effectively change a number of other
>users library.

	I did exactly this and managed to totally break nearly everything
on my system at once. It was a pretty neat trick. Fortunately I was able
to repair it, after a little running about red-faced. I think in the early
4.0 releases (the first with shared libs) SunOs had a bug in fgets() that
was rather serious - fixing it was simply a matter of repairing the system
library - so it's a useful feature if used carefully.
	The earlier versions of 4.X used to have a really amusing feature
in which the program that the systems administrator could use to manipulate
shared libraries was compiled with dynamic linking. So, if you *DID* trash
your shared-load cache, you couldn't fix it because the fixer was broken
too.

mjr.
-- 
Q: How many Real Programmers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: It depends.