Re: GLIBC_2.4
On Wed, Oct 31, 2007 at 07:54:32PM -0800, Ken Irving <fnkci@uaf.edu> was heard to say:
> My impression is that there's no particular reasons that it can't be done,
> but it just hasn't been done. There are probably wish list requests to
> this effect filed away somewhere on this, or so I dimly recall. My guess
> is that what it needs is a suitably motivated person to actually make
> it happen.
There are a few major problems.
Many programs (in fact probably most) hardcode paths. At the very
least they hardcode the path to their configuration file that tells them
where everything else is; they may also include linkages to libraries,
locations for data, etc. Since we don't have a system where a program's
data can be discovered from argv[0], this has to be the case. So if you
want to install a single binary package in multiple locations, it will
involve some sort of retrospective patching up of binaries, or perhaps
replacing binaries with wrapper scripts and modifying the program to
take its install location as a parameter (because of course many
programs don't support such a parameter by default). Note, however,
that the wrapper script approach won't work for libraries that have
associated data.
Furthermore, many packages drop files into locations determined by
other packages. For instance, Gnome programs drop files into /etc/gconf
to tell gconf about their systemwide defaults. If gconf is installed in
a different location, these programs need to know where to find it.
I'm sure these can be solved in principle, but it's not a trivial
problem to make everything work properly. I doubt you can even start to
get there without requiring modifications to every package.
Daniel
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