On Mon, Jan 29, 2001 at 11:15:40AM -0500, Pierre Phaneuf wrote:
> Ari Heitner wrote:
>
> > And if that's the approach, the mozilla shared objects need to have
> > appropriately versioned names, to allow multiple installs (even if you put
> > mozilla in separate dirs by version, you need a way to let the linker link
> > mozilla-dependent programs to the right libraries).
>
> Note that it isn't the linker that gets libraries in the components
> directory, it's XPCOM itself, using dlopen (or whatever the platform
> uses, through NSPR).
>
> In fact, that is one amusing detail with XPCOM, the name of the library
> doesn't matter at all! It will survey all the libraries at
> autoregistration time and will get components from whatever module
> (library) they are in...
That's the whole point. In the COM framework, you don't know what libraries
the code you depend on resides in until runtime. This has a key problem: you
can't tell if you've resolved your dependencies at install time!
The result: software that doesn't run because of evil dependency errors.
>
> > In windows ... I don't know a good way of doing this in windows :)
>
> You do it just like in Unix, as Microsoft itself is doing with MFC
> (MFC30.DLL, MFC40.DLL, MFC42.DLL, etc) and the Visual Basic runtime DLLs
> (VBRUN300.DLL, etc).
It should be more widely done and allow for more descriptive versioning.
Windows is *the same* as Unix in every major respect except the way the
distribution is managed :)
ari
