Re: spatial stuff detail

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Sun, 2003-09-21 at 17:48, John Siracusa wrote:
> >
> > That's not the kind "pluggable" he's talking about. He's talking about 
> > how developers treat their software.
> > On non-open source systems like MacOS X and Win32, software are 
> > usually large and monolithics do-it-alls with (almost) no dependancies 
> > or bundle all dependancies with them. That's because those operating 
> > systems don't encourage code sharing as much.
> 
> Er, how do you figure?  Both OSes use shared libraries extensively.  I 
> don't see one as "more shared" than the other.  The fact that most of 
> the GUI-related shared libraries in OS X are provided by Apple doesn't 
> make OS X any more "monolithic" than Linux in anything but the 
> political sense of the word.

You are confusing shared libraries with interchangable components.  You
never, ever repalce teh OS X or Win32 'libc' with another version, for
example, but you're quite free to use glibc, dietlibc, etc. w/ Linux.

Likewise, the OS X GUI is there to stay and not replaced.  The Windows
GUI is the same way.  yet on Linux, you can use XFree86, another X
server, DirectFB, Fresco, etc.  And then on top of those, you an run a
plain WM, a mini-desktop, or one of several full blown complete
destksops liek GNOME, KDE, ROX, XFCE, GNUStep, etc.

Also, the desktops vary a lot.  It *really* makes a difference if you
have GNOME2.0 or GNOME2.4 from a development standpoint, since apps
written for a later version don't work at all with the previous - the
API isn't really 'stable' at all, it's just kept backwards compatible. 
OS X, Win32, etc. are *more* stable (tho they certainly do change). 
Most Windows apps, for example, have *zero* dependencies aside from the
core OS services.  At most, they may need the VB runtime or the latest
DirectX runtime.

Compare this to Linux, UNIX, where we have a metric shitload of varying
libraries, toolkits, utility apps, etc., many of which aren't anywhere
close to stable in ABI, many of which have different versions that
aren't co-installable, none of which can be sanely or easily detected,
many of which can be installed or compiled in wholly incompatible ways,
etc.

*That's* how Linux is more "pluggable" and Windows/OS X more
"monolithic."

> 
> (and this is ignoring the Darwin side of things...)
> -John
> 
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-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.