Date:	Sun, 5 Jul 1998 16:35:36 +0300 (IDT)
From:	Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To:	Gerhard Gruber <sparhawk AT eunet DOT at>
cc:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	Re: Making Libraries
In-Reply-To:	<35a3e124.2129664@news.Austria.EU.net>
Message-ID:	<Pine.SUN.3.91.980705163518.23984c-100000@is>
MIME-Version:	1.0

On Thu, 2 Jul 1998, Gerhard Gruber wrote:

> >IMHO, overlays aren't worth the hassle.  They have all the disadvantages 
> >of shared libraries (having a program depend on several files) without 
> >the advantages (saving disk space).
> 
> That depends on what you are doing. We have some projects in my company where
> multiple programs run with the same basic libraries. Fixing a bug in one of
> these requires to ship out only this one library and fixing it in
> all programs at once.

This thread was about overlays, not sharted libraries.  With overlays,
you cannot produce them once and then use them with many programs.
Every program needs its own overlays.

As for the shared libraries, the situation you describe is an ideal
one, where the shared libraries serve a coherent set of programs
maintained by a single team.

In a less ideal situation, such as the one which exists with Windows
programs, the different and incompatible versions of the same DLLs
make an enormous mess, and are one of the main causes for frequent
crashes of end-user machines.  If you want to be sure your programs
will not crash and burn on the machine of John Doe the user, in
practice you need to distribute the shared library with the
executable, which all but defeats the purpose of the shared libraries.

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