In article <20010126154708.A1044@andrew>, "Ari Heitner"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 12:15:52PM -0800, Brendan Eich wrote:
>> > Speaking as a unix hacker ...
>> >
>> > Correct versioning on library names (which MS has *never* had)
>>
>> Really? jband tells me of resource info in DLLs used for versioning.
>> blizzard says redhat and others use an ELF section similarly, in
>> addition to the poor-man's version-metadata hacked into the filename
>> (hey, I'm an old Unix hacker too, filename hacking with versionless
>> symlinks suit me).
>
> While the version info *is* there in DLL's, it's not sufficient.
[snip - a lot of stuff I agree with]
Having the version in the name works just dandy for things that are
linked with (and as has been mentioned, tracking dependencies for such
libraries is one of the nice features libtool provides). But how useful
is this decoration for shared objects that don't get linked with at
compile time--i.e., XPCOM modules? It obviously isn't something that
would be tracked with linking tools. Seems to me that runtime is the only
time you can resolve the version on these things. Furthermore, wouldn't
multiple versions of the same XPCOM module be a Bad Idea given the way
XPCOM currently works? (I know some potential solutions to this problem
have been discussed, but IIRC they weren't at all simple to implement and
there was no clear winning strategy.)
Braden
