On Sunday 14 February 2010 20:44:32 Enrico Weigelt wrote: > Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: > > no, but with static exes you have to recompile everything > > everytime a security bug is found. > > That's the job of the distro buildsystem. Ah, and that dramatically > minimizes the chance that things break apart (i still remember > the old times when libc updates tended to be dangerous). > > > Oh - and didn't you just complain about bloat? Nothing means > > more bloat than static binaries. > > As already said, all this under the axiom that libs are *small* > and complex/redundant things are done by separate services. > Perhaps you might have a look at Plan9 and how its done there.
To be fair, Plan9 is Unix done right. For all it's power, Unix (the system, not just the kernel) has some very severe flaws. Why can't I prepend data to a file using any of the common shells? Why are pipes 1 input 1 output, instead of the more useful 1 input same data to 2 or more outputs? Why is the permission model so simplistic? Why is ELF so prone to bloat (or more accurately why do so many compilers generate such large libs?) The answer is because of the available constraints at the time these things were introduced. Partly the amount of grunt available from systems of the time, partly the speed of disks, partly to keep things simple and to an irreducible minimum, with a huge helping of how easy a platform it is to develop on. For better or worse, what we have is what we have and it's the sum total of the past. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
