Windows and DLLs

["Wesley Felter" <wesf cs utexas edu>]

Y'all might be interested in knowing about Microsoft's solution to their DLL
Hell problem; it's called Windows Installer. Since you can't trust an
installer to do anything right, MS proposes to do away with a separate
installer for each application. Instead, in NT 5 there will be One True
Installer that will be built in and will handle all installs and uninstalls.
The installer will also presumably enforce MS's new rules about overwriting
newer DLLs with older ones. Software developers will simply create packages
that can be installed by this installer. Sound familiar?

Also, I hear that in NT 5 the default settings will have the WINNT directory
only writable by Administrator; this is a new concept compared to NT 4 where
the entire filesystem is writable by every user.

All this talk about location independence and shared libraries makes me
wonder: Why *can't* Linux binaries run from just any random location in the
filesystem? BeOS doesn't seem to have any problem with it. This is not a
complaint; I just don't know how dynamic linking works so I'd be interested
in knowing the technical details of why it's hard/impossible for binaries to
be location-independent. Feel free to lecture me off-list if this is
off-topic.

Wesley Felter - wesf@cs.utexas.edu
"For the right price I can get everything" -- Soul Coughing