[OLUG] Old libraries question

[Phil Brutsche]

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far way, someone said...

> Could someone please help me out with a library question I have.  I have
> been migrating our RH5.x servers  and Slackware (2.0.30kernel) to RH6.1.
> Everything has been going great, my only problem is that one of our
> "programmers" insists that I copy the libc.so.4 library to every machine and
> enable the binfmt_aout.o module.  I have tried to get him to just recompile
> his programs so that they are not dependant on the older library, but for
> some reason he refuses.  I have been able to find a few of the source codes
> and was successful in recompiling.  He still refuses to help out.  I need
> some help as I go to upper-management to convince them that he needs to get
> his act-together.  Can anyone give me reasons to either keep the older
> library and the aout module or to recompile and get everything up to the
> same level.  I need some compelling reasons for the management to side with
> me.

A reason not to take a.out away: can't think of one
Reasons to take a.out away:
 * can't guarantee that it'll be available in later kernels (prolly full
   of holes)
 * Saves memory by not having it there (same reasoning as for libc5)
 * No one maintains it - it's very likely got bugs (like not being Y2K
   compliant) that have been fixed in the newer libc (prolly the biggest
   reason)
 * Not taking advantage of features in glibc2.1
 * Probably many others that I'm not thinking of right now

The only reason to keep a.out around is that not all programs can be
compiled as ELF for some reason.

> If I am way off base I don't mind being wrong.  Please no flames -- I'm not
> a programmer.

Perfectly reasonable.

> Is this a good analogy? -- The libc.so.4 is to RH6.1 what a Windoze 3.1 DLL
> is to WinNT?  Just an analogy, our managers know the "term" windows - so
> they can relate.  I'm sure that there are a zillion holes in the idea, but
> it might get  the idea accross.

It's a pretty good analogy - libc4 (aka libc.so.4) is for the a.out binary
format.  Almost no programs use it, and even fewer distributions include
it.

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Phil Brutsche					pbrutsch at creighton.edu

"There are two things that are infinite; Human stupidity and the
universe. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein


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