Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 19:27:21 -0800 (PST) From: Frank Mayhar <frank@exit.com> To: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Unfortunate dynamic linking for everything Message-ID: <200311190327.hAJ3RLiB087132@realtime.exit.com> In-Reply-To: <200311190253.hAJ2rAWO001198@dyson.jdyson.com>
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I just thought I would chime in on this heated debate and maybe add a little gasoline or at least a few oily rags. :-) For what it's worth, I've been running FreeBSD literally since before its inception, when it was merely a collection of patches to 386BSD 0.1. I'm also a longtime kernel guy so I do have a bit of a professional opinion. I tend to think that making the binaries in / dynamic is a bad idea. It is one of those that is floated from time to time, and ends up being voted down, often after someone has to recover a hosed system without having the appropriate shared libraries available. It seems like a good idea on the surface, but I really think it's an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" situation. The amount of space it will save is trivial relative to the size of modern disks and the size of the rest of the distribution. I really don't care that much about how fast the system boots; even if you slowed it to half its current speed it would still be much faster than anything Microsoft has produced. If you're upgrading "security libraries" (or whatever), it's really as easy to upgrade the binaries in /bin and /sbin as it is to replace the libraries. There's just not that much there. Both Matt and John are right. You guys are trying to solve a non-problem. Please don't. There are much better things on which to spend your time. -- Frank Mayhar frank@exit.com http://www.exit.com/ Exit Consulting http://www.gpsclock.com/ http://www.exit.com/blog/frank/
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