Re: unremovable files and possible fs corruption (2.1.123)
Jamie Lokier (lkd@tantalophile.demon.co.uk)
Sat, 10 Oct 1998 16:51:31 +0100
On Fri, Oct 09, 1998 at 09:48:41AM -0700, Tim Smith wrote:
> It is for structures that are badly designed, like (unfortunately) many
> Unix structures. This is one thing Microsoft got right. Almost all
> system-defined structures start out with a field that the user fills in
> with the size of the structure before giving it to the system. If new
> fields have been added at the end that the program doesn't know about,
> the system simply doesn't fill them. As long as MS limits themselves
> to only adding new fields at the end and not changing the meaning of the
> old fields, they don't break old software.
Ick, ELF symbol versioning does this much more cleanly, as used by Glibc.
With versioning, new interfaces don't have to preserve the fields and
semantics of older interfaces, and new programs don't have the run-time
overheads of historical compatability.
-- Jamie
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