Re: geekyness and ESR's recent tome

GreyGeek <jkreps@neb.rr.com> writes:

> Debian's package installer is best, but their stable release is 18 months
> behind RH, SUSE and MDK. I had Debian on my machine about 30 minutes before
> I decided it was too retrograde.

I certainly don't want to defend how long Debian takes between
releases (I think they need to increase their release schedule to once
a year), but I've found in practice that it's not too bad. For the
developers in my lab, I've set them up on stable for the most part,
and added backports into a local pool when we needed something more
up-to-date. Most of the developers don't mind, since they just want
to work on their code, not play with XFree86 4.4 the afternoon it hits
the streets. The ones who do want something more on the edge can
change their personal machine to run either testing or unstable (or
more of the www.backports.org packages).

>> The primary purpose of shared libraries, today, is not saving
>> memory or disk space, but facilitating interoperability. The
>> savings are just nice side-effects.
>
> Sorry, but that's not what I learned when I was learning how to
> compile ELF applications using gcc. Dynamic libraries were used to
> miminize precious disk and memory space.

http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2003-10.html

In my humble opinion, something like that CERT advisory is the best
reason to have dynamic libraries. Security problems in library code;
I'd much rather be able to update one library and know that any
application that uses that library is now safe(r), than have to
download new versions of applications every time a security problem
that might affect it is uncovered.

-- 
Stephen L. Peters                                  portnoy@portnoy.org
  GPG fingerprint: A1BF 5A81 03E7 47CE 71E0  3BD4 8DA6 9268 5BB6 4BBE
	  "And if I'm flying solo, at least I'm flying free
	 To those who ground me, take a message back from me.
	    Tell them how I'm defying gravity." -- Wicked
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