[Haskell-cafe] Re: Hackage on Linux

[Richard O'Keefe]

On Aug 27, 2010, at 6:11 AM, Brandon S Allbery KF8NH wrote:
> Um.  That's a really good way to have all your programs stop working when
> the Linux kernel interface changes yet again ("ABIs? We don't need no
> steenking ABIs!" --- see in /usr/src/linux/Documentation).  Solaris is
> similar; the only approved interface is via libc and you must link to it
> shared if you want your program to work across versions/releases.

Yeah, right.  So here I am running "SunOS 5.10 Generic January 2005"
and the version/release has changed incompatibly just *how* often?
That's on a SPARC.  On the Mac I have OpenSolaris, and guess how often
new releases have broken things on that?  This little helpfulness from
Sun (can't blame Oracle for this one, much as I'd like to) broke
profiling and has never ever gained me personally anything.  If there
_were_ a new release I'd have to rebuild everything anyway, A *P* I
changes have been more common than A *B* I ones.

Maybe Linux is different.  One thing is NOT different, and that is
Linux upgrades *DO* reliably break programs that use dynamic linking.
Dynamic libraries get
 - left out
 - changed incompatibly
 - moved some place else
 - changed compatibly but the version number altered so the dynamic
   linker doesn't believe it, or the foolsXXXXXXkind people who built
   the program wired in a demand for a particular version
Indeed, every Linux upgrade I've had I've found myself screaming in
frustration because programs *weren't* statically linked.




> 
> (Which is the reason shared library support is important.  I personally like
> my programs to keep working.)
> 
> - -- 
> brandon s. allbery     [linux,solaris,freebsd,perl]      allbery at kf8nh.com
> system administrator  [openafs,heimdal,too many hats]  allbery at ece.cmu.edu
> electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university      KF8NH
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