ESR: Goodbye Fedora- big picture

[Steve Friedman]

On Thu, 22 Feb 2007, Tom Horsley wrote:

> On Thu, 22 Feb 2007 10:59:16 -0800
> "John P. Fisher" <john.fisher at znyx.com> wrote:
>
>> 3) I guess if I could wave a wand, I'd have a set of common fundamental
>> libraries that get shared and maintain compatibility between distro
>> releases, and everything else would be handled by the applications
>> themselves. Maybe this is plain dumb, but it sure would be easier for me...
>
> I'd just have every single app have its very own versions of every library
> it needs with a reaper that runs around at low priority hard-linking
> the ones that are identical :-).
>
>

Then you've forgotten the zlib security issues of only 5 years ago.  A 
security vulernability was found in a compression library common to over 
500 apps.  Those that dynamically linked to zlib were patched with a 
single upgrade; however, large numbers of apps had to be recompiled 
because they statically linked to zlib.  This was a *major* security 
crisis -- and *many* apps/utilities switched to dynamic linking of zlib 
(and other common libraries) to avoid this happening again.

Steve Friedman