21–30 of 68 posts
I watched this a couple weeks ago and it just seems to have so little information density - like this guy talks and talks and talks and the actual content is like 15 minutes of this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They all package different versions of the shared libs...
glibc has really good backward compatibility. But, yeah, few other libraries even bother, let alone make a serious attempt at this. One of the major exceptions is libvirt, which promised 100% backward compatibility from day 1. Here's a great overview (2011) of how they accomplish that: https://www.berrange.com/posts/2011/01/13/versioning-in-the-... Note that it wasn't until GCC 10 (2020) that you could implement ELF…
That has really not been my experience.
I've consistently hit problem with older software not running because it detected an incompatible version of GLIBC.
Wouldn't be so bad if the talk and the discussion here provided any value...
Whats the state of Linux on the desktop in 2020? What distribution do you recommend for a normal person to use?
Whats the state of Linux on the desktop in 2020? What distribution do you recommend for a normal person to use?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
glibc has really good backward compatibility. But, yeah, few other libraries even bother, let alone make a serious attempt at this. One of the major exceptions is libvirt, which promised 100% backward compatibility from day 1. Here's a great overview (2011) of how they accomplish that: https://www.berrange.com/posts/2011/01/13/versioning-in-the-... Note that it wasn't until GCC 10 (2020) that you could implement ELF…
> glibc has really good backward compatibility. That has really not been my experience. I've consistently hit problem with older software not running because it detected an incompatible version of GLIBC.
I've often had issues with compiling, either because of unwarranted assumptions in the third-party projects or because glibc made changes to their absurdly complex naming and feature gating hacks in their header files.
But glibc uses symbol versioning so even if the prototype of function foo changes, older software built against version X.Y should still link to fooX.Y at runtime. I don't follow glibc closely enough to know how many times they've accidentally broken things, though. I'm sure it's happened.
More complex runtime behaviors, like with the DNS resolver, are definitely common, but usually it's debatable whether glibc is fairly blameworthy.
Whats the state of Linux on the desktop in 2020? What distribution do you recommend for a normal person to use?
Super happy finally to see someone call out backward compatibility (around 31:20) Linux is terrible on this axis, way worse than Windows. EDIT: and statically linking your app doesn't cut it. First, it's barely possible to do that with "modern" glibc. Second, glibc itself breaks old apps.
That would, make sense? Microsoft has valued backwards compatibility way more than most would consider reasonable.
In that way MS do not have to care anymore for older software and security problems.
EDIT: Why the down-vote? A lighter OS would make a lot of sense.
Super happy finally to see someone call out backward compatibility (around 31:20) Linux is terrible on this axis, way worse than Windows. EDIT: and statically linking your app doesn't cut it. First, it's barely possible to do that with "modern" glibc. Second, glibc itself breaks old apps.
musl works just fine for that