[geeks] broken software

[Jochen Kunz]

On Fri, 2 Dec 2005 11:06:25 -0500
Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:

> The clock applet won't load.  Checking its library dependencies with
> ldd I was amazed to find it depends on Firefox, the WWW browser.
An other guess: clock-applet is one of several hard links to the same
binary and the binary decides how to behave depending on argv[0]. This
kind of trick is often used by Gnome and KDE. Once one of this applets
is started it gets mmap(2)ed into VM. If an other applet is started, that
is in the same binary, it is already in VM and disk access is minimized.
All libs will be loaded upon the first exec(2) of the binary, giving an
extra speedup for subsequent exec(2)s. Effect: Shorter GUI response
times. This "fat" binary is also smaller then a myriad of separate
binaries. Think of bussy box for Linux or the /rescue/sh binary in
NetBSD.

An other possibilty: GNOME is simply unable to proper sort out the lib
dependencies and links all binaries against all libs.
--


tsch|_,
       Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/