Re: DLL vs Shared Library

Daniel Carrera wrote:
Tony Arnold wrote:

And I believe the packging system developed by Ian Murdoch of Debian was
designed explicitly to separate out libraries from applications into
different packages. I think this was a stroke of genius as no-one had
thought to do it like this before!


How is it different from RPM or BSD's ports?


I don't know. I'm not familiar with these. I was just under the
impression that Debian did it first.


Hmmm... It looks like they are all very close.

Debian, FreeBSD and RedHat were all founded in 1993. FreeBSD was before Debian (not sure about RH). This is just 2 years after Linus' famous email:

Hello everybody out there using minix -

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't
be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.

FreeBSD branched out from 4.4BSD but I don't know if 4.4BSD had ports yet. So, it looks like all three systems are contemporary with each other unless BSD ports date back from 4.4BSD.


NetBSD actually predates FreeBSD, but only by a few months. NetBSD sprang directly from 386/BSD, who's history can be traced all the way back to the first "Berkeley Software Distribution" in 1977. It's kind of hard to say when ports was "invented" because in a way ports has always been part of BSD. The ports system, at heart, works just like BSD's sysinstall, in terms of software integration. BSD's development really took off in the late '70s because of DARPA's need to update aging equipment and settle on a unified platform for the various pieces of software DARPA ran on a variety of incompatible operating systems. DARPA turned to Berkeley for help, so almost from the beginning BSD was designed with application portability in mind. It may not have been called "ports" though, until the whole idea of downloading software from Internet repositories came into vogue.

But in terms of the OP's claim that Debian was the first to separate out libraries from applications -- BSD was doing that well before Linus wrote Linux.


--
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream." --S. Jackson

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