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Reply-To: Rick Campbell <rickc@lehman.com>
X-Windows: Considered Harmful.
Organization: Lehman Brothers Inc.
From: Rick Campbell <rickc@lehman.com>
To: N J Doye <nic@niss.ac.uk>
Cc: XEmacs Beta List <xemacs-beta@xemacs.org>
Subject: Re: Solaris dynamics? 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 30 Jun 1997 16:04:52 -0000."
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Date: Mon, 30 Jun 1997 12:19:07 -0400
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    From: N J Doye <nic@niss.ac.uk>
    Date: Mon, 30 Jun 1997 16:04:52 +0000
    
    Rick Campbell spake thus:
    
    I think you're being very unfair to Sun.

Probably so -- dealing with these issues has been keeping me from what
I actually need to get done today so it's gotten me frustrated.

In general, I have a definite bias against dynamic linking.  I use it
on my home PC running Linux mostly because I also upgrade by fully
reinstalling and it seems to work alright for a single machine.
However, in my experience, the more distributed things are, the less
reliable dynamic linking becomes.

    I've worked in some very heterogeneous environments you'd ever
    hope to encounter, and have rarely had such trouble.
    
    I mean we had 4 different versions of Solaris (plus circa 7 other
    families of Unix) and I've always compiled everything dynamically. The 
    only time I've been caught out was under Irix, and symlinking fixed
    that.

The sorts of things that I run into all the time -- even under SunOS
-- include stuff like different X applications built against different
versions of X won't run right without different values of
LD_LIBRARY_PATH.  I've `fixed' this by building X11R6.3 with fully
static linking and building lots of apps that are already available
locally so that they have no dynamic linking.  If an app happens to
run alright with my moby LD_LIBRARY_PATH, I let it be, otherwise my
`fix' makes the executable more robust and resistant to unexpected
environments.
    
    I think your sysadmins are taking the piss if they install things in
    different places on every machine.

Absolutely.  Actually, it's not so much that *every* machine has a
different place, but that you can't count on *every* machine having
things in the same place.

    And if they won't put the symlinks in for you - hack a root shell
    - after all, it is Solaris. :-)

Now who's being hard on them?  :-)

Anyway, I've already taken the root script approach for my own
workstation, but I'm hesitant to start trying to violate security all
over the place on NFS and AFS.

			Rick

