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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!haven.umd.edu!news.umbc.edu!eff!news.kei.com!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!ai-lab!life.ai.mit.edu!mycroft From: mycroft@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Charles Hannum) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc Subject: Re: Status on discussed merge between NetBSD and FreeBSD Date: 15 Nov 1993 01:23:36 GMT Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab Lines: 35 Message-ID: <MYCROFT.93Nov14202336@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu> References: <CGD.93Nov14085627@eden.cs.berkeley.edu> <CGHs3y.Au2@kithrup.com> <DERAADT.93Nov14110240@pain.agate> <CGIB9E.7z9@aib.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: duality.ai.mit.edu In-reply-to: dwex@aib.com's message of Mon, 15 Nov 1993 00:12:49 GMT In article <CGIB9E.7z9@aib.com> dwex@aib.com (David E. Wexelblat) writes: Because all the discussion on the XFree86 development list makes it pretty clear that libXt-based programs DON'T WORK. Dave, PLEASE STOP STATING THAT. IT IS WRONG. I have personally run X applications using a shared Xt, and they work just fine. Admittedly, the current linker is slightly hacked to make this work, but it does in fact work. First compile with PIC, next link with '-G'. That's it. There are no .sa files with SVR4 shared libraries. And if you had bothered to check your facts, you'd find that is exactly what is being worked on. This entire subthread is ridiculous. The point of the original statement regarding shared libraries was that the FreeBSD people tried to pick them up without any real understanding of what was going on, and had enormous troubles. The hack they've done to ld.so to make it work at all without random segmentation faults on startup (namely, the stack pointer comparison) will very likely cause a binary incompatibility if they ever want to enlarge the kernel's virtual address space, unless they do further kluging in the kernel. The fact that they do not think about such issues until it bites them in the ass is one of the reasons I don't want them having unlimited write access to the source I use. Of course, there is always the chance they will read this and go fix it now.