[geeks] broken software

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

der Mouse wrote:
>>The clock applet won't load.  Checking its library dependencies [...]
> 
> 
>>A selection of wierd items the clock "depends" on:
> 
> 
> All of the explanations below are pure guesswork, but they seem
> plausible to me.
> 
> 
>>	libgnome-keyring.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgnome-keyring.so.0 (0xb75d1000)
>>Why does the clock applet need access to keyrings?
> 
> 
> So it can speak to the server through a secured channel, using crypto
> for authentication instead of MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 - and possibly for
> conidentiality too.

That doesn't have to be at the app level.  It can be in the X server and 
the app never needs to care about it.

That's the beauty of X: you can convert the communications to being your 
grandmother and a wheelbarrow, and the apps don't need to know about it.

> So it's capable of speaking to the server over a compressed channel,
> suitable for use over a modem (a la lbx).

See above.  Remember, this is just a clock...

> Because the Xlib version you're using has sound extensions, and in the
> Brave New World of shared libraries, you need to pull in everything
> used by anything in a library you pull in, not anything used by the
> fractions you use of that library.  (This is one of the loses of shared
> libraries: the granularity level of code inclusion is the library,
> rather than the file in the library.)

Well, that's certainly true, and its horribly broken of course.

> Sure.  "Scrap Gnome" seems like a good one to me, though admittedly
> that's probably in part because a lot of Gnome's choices are
> anathematical to me.

Unfortunately several applications that I use run badly without Gnome or 
KDE.  They need them for font support, and creating a GUI that is usable.

Without one or the other, a lot of applications have really crappy GUI 
layout and fonts, for starters.

Anyway, going a bit further, even without the libraries, I find the 
clock applet also uses several megabytes of its own allocations, and it 
leaks memory to the tune of abut 15K per hour.

Nothing like taking a bad problem (the current shared library mess) and 
making it worse, eh?