Shared libraries are not necessary

[Masataka Ohta]

In article <1991May16.083123.26599 at kithrup.COM>
	sef at kithrup.COM (Sean Eric Fagan) writes:

First, as I don't think X is necessary, measurement on X is nothing
to me. But you may claim I am conservative.

>Now, let's be conservative, and say that you have only about, say, a dozen X
>applications on your system (the X server, xterm, xclock, xbiff, xgif,
>xtrek, a few programs you've grabbed and compiled).  Using shared libraries
>is a savings of 1572864 bytes.  That's 1.5Mbytes.  Taking up disk space all
>of the time, whether the programs are in use or not.

>That is a *very* conservative estimate.

I don't think your estimate with xterm, xclock, xbiff, xgif, xtrek, a few
programs you've grabbed and compiled, is conservative.

Though some people around me use X, they usually only use xterm and sometimes
xdvi or xtex. That's all.

And, even with your radical example, 1.5Mbytes is negligible for a machine
which run xterm, xclock, xbiff, xgif, xtrek, a few programs you've grabbed
and compiled.

>On a SparcStation 2, in /usr/bin/X11, xterm in dynamically linked, xtex
>isn't.

How much memory dose YOUR SS2 have? I remember minimum is 16MB, which
is much larger than 1.5MB.

>>	2) shared libraries dose not help software version up
>>	   from /etc/hosts to DNS

>Please tell that to all of the Sun sites who upgrade to using a nameserver
>simply by installing *one new file* (the shared library).

After changing gethostbyent structure, that is, RECOMPILAION, all of the
Sun sites can fully upgrade to DNS, of course.

And, as I have proved, the change and, thus, recompilation was necessary
because of DNS.

>But I forgot:  you don't accept the fact that people can code to use the new
>structures and still use /etc/hosts.

Yes, you forgot I accept.

As I already stated for the measurment data of SONY's NWS3800, people can
code to use the new structures and still use /etc/hosts with negligible
amount of code space. Recompilation is not necessary even if they
change mind to use DNS or NIS.

The same thing hold with MIPS RISC/OS 4.5.

						Masataka Ohta