Re: [MiNT] distro cross-building

[Eero Tamminen <oak@helsinkinet.fi>]

Hi,

On Monday 13 October 2008, Mark Duckworth wrote:
> >     How would you indicate that dependent packages need updated...
> >     i.e. we statically link everything to mintlib, mintlib is updated,
> >     every package would then need to be updated to reflect this
> >     change...  how would we handle this elegantly?

If things are statically linked, nothing's forcing things to be rebuilt.
Statically linked stuff works as long as the kernel interface and
relevant user-space IPC APIs don't change.


> > Don't know if it's elegant but the idea was to make nightly builds for
> > every package so this shouldn't be much different. We have maybe 100
> > packages so this is task maybe for 2-3 hours with cross compiler,
> > right?
>
> Yes but then users can't be expected to download all 100 packages every
> night because some might possibly have been rebuilt?  Dynamic linking
> was designed as the best solution to this problem so it seems reasonable
> that that's what we should aim for ;)

Besides lower level feature additions, only real reason from the user's
point of view for doing this kind of mass upgrade things would be security
updates.  For those it's much nicer to have dynamic libraries so that you
don't need to chase every single thing that links the old buggy version
of a library.

I think MiNT would need to get a bit more popular to start suffering from
security exploits though.  Buffer overflows can still crash programs facing
internet, but the stuff relying on dynamic lib linking, certain addresses,
x86 etc. is unlikely to be a succesful at the exploit. :-)

Bugs in interpreters and/or interpreted code like PHP, Python, Perl etc
would still be a cause for concern.


	- Eero