DLL vs Shared Library

[Michael M.]

Daniel Carrera wrote:
> Tony Arnold wrote:
> 
>>>> And I believe the packging system developed by Ian Murdoch of Debian 
>>>> was
>>>> designed explicitly to separate out libraries from applications into
>>>> different packages. I think this was a stroke of genius as no-one had
>>>> thought to do it like this before!
>>>
>>>
>>> How is it different from RPM or BSD's ports?
>>
>>
>> I don't know. I'm not familiar with these. I was just under the
>> impression that Debian did it first.
> 
> 
> Hmmm... It looks like they are all very close.
> 
> Debian, FreeBSD and RedHat were all founded in 1993. FreeBSD was before 
> Debian (not sure about RH). This is just 2 years after Linus' famous email:
> 
>      Hello everybody out there using minix -
> 
>      I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't
>      be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.
> 
> FreeBSD branched out from 4.4BSD but I don't know if 4.4BSD had ports 
> yet. So, it looks like all three systems are contemporary with each 
> other unless BSD ports date back from 4.4BSD.
> 

NetBSD actually predates FreeBSD, but only by a few months.  NetBSD 
sprang directly from 386/BSD, who's history can be traced all the way 
back to the first "Berkeley Software Distribution" in 1977.  It's kind 
of hard to say when ports was "invented" because in a way ports has 
always been part of BSD.  The ports system, at heart, works just like 
BSD's sysinstall, in terms of software integration.  BSD's development 
really took off in the late '70s because of DARPA's need to update aging 
equipment and settle on a unified platform for the various pieces of 
software DARPA ran on a variety of incompatible operating systems. 
DARPA turned to Berkeley for help, so almost from the beginning BSD was 
designed with application portability in mind.  It may not have been 
called "ports" though, until the whole idea of downloading software from 
Internet repositories came into vogue.

But in terms of the OP's claim that Debian was the first to separate out 
  libraries from applications -- BSD was doing that well before Linus 
wrote Linux.


-- 
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions 
of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to 
dream."  --S. Jackson