Re: PC-BSD

["Jonas Sundström" <jonas@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Steve O'Hara-Smith <steve@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Apr 2005 17:56:25 +0200 CEST
> "Jonas Sundström" <jonas@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > Anyway, there's really no magic to BeOS's solution.
> > Apps are usually distributed as zipped up app folders,
> > with the needed libraries in a subfolder named 'lib'.
> 
> 	That would seem to make libraries pretty pointless the
> apps might as well be statically linked. It would certainly 
> be a huge waste of space to have a copy of everything 
> from libgtk+ down to libc in with every gtk app on the 
> system.

On a Unix system, maybe. I don't know.
You seem used to massive cross-port dependencies

The BeOS API is highlevel, and in C++.
Most applications don't need any extra libraries, 
being fully served by the system libraries.

Unix ports are popular on BeOS, but not the GUI apps.
There's no native GTK or QT, and X doesn't integrate
well, so few people actually use GUI apps from unix.

Firefox is the exception. But it's got a native GUI.

> It would also make it a nightmare when a security 
> problem is found in some fairly common library - 
> instead of just upgrading the appropriate library 
> every application that used it would have to be 
> upgraded.
 
Well, that's what your CLI power is for,
or you have some package system take care of it.

I imagine the actual testing of every affected app to ensure 
that they still work correctly is a much larger task. No?

/Jonas Sundström.                 www.kirilla.com