Newbies' guide [was: Re: [plug] Newbys guide]

[Craig Ringer]

On Sun, 2005-01-30 at 14:05 +0800, James Devenish wrote:

> True. And yet, remarkably, this conflicts with providing a stable,
> reliable and secure operating system. I guess this bears some
> explanation! Two of the reasons you often can't just "download
> a [UNIX] application...and play with it" are:
> 
>  - software dependencies

... though it's possible to work around this using static linking at the
cost of increased binary size and reduced flexibility.

>  - Security: your Linux vendor can update its components and all
>    the dependent third-party applications become secured. If the
>    applications had been using bundled components, your security
>    would remain compromised.

The recent JPEG decoding debacle under Windows demonstrates this well.
Imagine what'd happen if there was a major hole discovered, in say, the
MS Visual C++ 6 runtime library? (MSVCRTblah.dll) .

>  - Stability: your Linux applications won't conflict with each other
>    because they know how to share components compatibly. once you get
>    it working, it'll keep working.

In other words, no apps overwriting shared libraries in the system
directories with incompatible versions. I'm sure all of us who've
operated Windows systems (and the odd pre-OS-X mac) have experienced
this little bit of "fun".

Shared library versioning also helps eliminate this problem.

-- 
Craig Ringer