At 11:40 PM 1/21/99 -0800, David LeBlanc wrote:
>I'm wondering what critical system libraries us Windows programmers are
>free to overwrite when installing new software on Windows?
>
>Aside from the language libraries (i.e. msvcrtNN.dll), the equivilent of
>which ARE also updated with fair regularity on Linux (every time a new gcc
>comes out pretty much - and I keep hearing tales about some version of gcc
>being good or bad to compile Linux in), i'm not aware of any vender
>shipping a modified version of, for instance, win32.dll, user32.dll,
>kernel32.dll, gdi32.dll etc.

Let's see, how about CTL3D32.DLL, COMCTL32.dll, MFCxx.DLL, OLEAUT32.DLL,
and OLEPRO32.DLL. These are all listed in the MSDN documentation as
developer redistributables. If we include files updated by things like
Internet Explorer, the list grows, and includes important ones like
crypt32.dll and the Java VM (a couple of versions). This is an incomplete
list.

I've seen incompatable versions of these bring down apps, over and over.

As Microsoft has claimed in their trial, ALL this stuff is part of the OS.

I'm also not sure Linux is immune to this problem.

- Jan
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