Re: Hurd Projects

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Fri, Dec 21, 2001 at 09:00:21AM -0700, mike burrell wrote:
> deniability".  unfortunately Hurd doesn't offer namespaces a la Plan9, as
> that would make things easier.

What is this namespace a la Plan9 feature?  Maybe we do have it in disguise
or can easily provide it.  Our name space is the filesystem, and it turned
out to be amazingly flexible so far.

> anyway, if you look in /usr/lib or wherever on your machine, you'll see
> tonnes of symlinks and files like:
>         foo.so -> foo-4.so
>         foo-4.so.4 -> foo-4.3.so
>         foo-4.3.so -> foo-4.3.0.so
>         foo-4.3.0.so
>         foo-3.so -> foo-3.19.so
>         foo-3.8.so -> foo-3.8.6.so
>         foo-3.8.6.so
>         foo-3.19.so -> foo-3.19.1.so
>         foo-3.19.1.so
>         foo-3.19.0.so
> and the linker and loader have to sort through all them, and it's basically
> a big mess.  with version-control, presumably you could just reduce this
> down to a single file:
>         foo.so
> and the loader would specify a version number when it's trying to load a
> binary.
> 
> i mean it doesn't really buy you any new functionality -- it's not going to
> solve world hunger or anything -- it would just clean up your /lib dir a
> little bit so you don't cringe whenever you do an 'ls' :)

The answer is to not do an "ls" :)  Seriously, I don't think this is
feasible.  For one, there is an expectation how shared libraries are handled
in the filesystem, and I don't see a benefit in breaking this expectation.
It's not only the loader, but also the linker, libtool and probably a bunch
of other programs (and all the packaging scripts etc... I remember very well
how much difficulties we had with the little derivation we do have from the
Linux naming of the libraries).

Second, there are bootstrap issues.  The loader is loaded directly from
the root filesystem, so you have to link the root filesystem statically.
But all other translators are linked with the shared libraries.  Any
potential solution to this problem makes _me_ cringe ;)

Thanks,
Marcus



-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann              GNU    http://www.gnu.org    marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de