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acroyearSherman, set the wayback machine for 22 years ago.
Now give me a unix system. Specs? Nice CPU, decent (not exceptional, thanks to Congress trying to screw the Japanese and screwing us instead) memory, cool monitor and hey, X11R4 seems to be running pretty nice...In a couple of years, there might be a decent library to go on it, if Microsoft and HP have anything to say about it.
Now what was wrong with this picture? A *tiny* hard drive. A mere 32 meg. Hmm...we keep running out of space just putting the basic dist on it, nevermind having actual room to do our own thing. Ok, NFS and a central user box helped a little, but it's still tiny and there's more stuff to add that's HUGE, like all that Motif stuff coming down the pipe. I can't get a bigger one, 'cause they're just too damn expensive (especially with all of IBM's patents - and they're the COMPETITION). What to do...
Oh, I know, lets *share* the libraries.
And the Unix equivilant of DLL Hell was born.
If you've ever dealt with Solaris, you are so deep in shared library hell that even Dante would go, "dude, what the fuck did YOU do?".
Now back to the present, where the truth of today is: hard drive space is cheap. It is practically free. You can't give hard drives away. I have more hard drive space attached to my desktop right now than my entire school had in 1988.
So why the FUCK do we still have shared libraries and shared library hell every time we try to get two 3rd party tools from two different companies to actually co-exist on the same fucking box, where one needs "2.2.1" and the other needs "2.2.1.3" and neither will work with the other?
There is no fucking reason for it any more. None at all.
The solution: take advantage of all that cheap fucking disk space and go back to static linking. A million compatibility problems solved at once. Everybody nicely provides, hard-coded into their programs' binaries, everything they need and nobody has to go installing a million other things and worry about them breaking everything else they have.
It all just works, bitches.
Then we can all get back to the other incompatbility issue, like the fact that Solaris still provides a brain-dead bourne sh that hasn't changed a single line of code in 35 years. You know, REAL problems.
Now give me a unix system. Specs? Nice CPU, decent (not exceptional, thanks to Congress trying to screw the Japanese and screwing us instead) memory, cool monitor and hey, X11R4 seems to be running pretty nice...In a couple of years, there might be a decent library to go on it, if Microsoft and HP have anything to say about it.
Now what was wrong with this picture? A *tiny* hard drive. A mere 32 meg. Hmm...we keep running out of space just putting the basic dist on it, nevermind having actual room to do our own thing. Ok, NFS and a central user box helped a little, but it's still tiny and there's more stuff to add that's HUGE, like all that Motif stuff coming down the pipe. I can't get a bigger one, 'cause they're just too damn expensive (especially with all of IBM's patents - and they're the COMPETITION). What to do...
Oh, I know, lets *share* the libraries.
And the Unix equivilant of DLL Hell was born.
If you've ever dealt with Solaris, you are so deep in shared library hell that even Dante would go, "dude, what the fuck did YOU do?".
Now back to the present, where the truth of today is: hard drive space is cheap. It is practically free. You can't give hard drives away. I have more hard drive space attached to my desktop right now than my entire school had in 1988.
So why the FUCK do we still have shared libraries and shared library hell every time we try to get two 3rd party tools from two different companies to actually co-exist on the same fucking box, where one needs "2.2.1" and the other needs "2.2.1.3" and neither will work with the other?
There is no fucking reason for it any more. None at all.
The solution: take advantage of all that cheap fucking disk space and go back to static linking. A million compatibility problems solved at once. Everybody nicely provides, hard-coded into their programs' binaries, everything they need and nobody has to go installing a million other things and worry about them breaking everything else they have.
It all just works, bitches.
Then we can all get back to the other incompatbility issue, like the fact that Solaris still provides a brain-dead bourne sh that hasn't changed a single line of code in 35 years. You know, REAL problems.
