Florian Pesth wrote:
> If it is done correctly, it knows which programs depend on the "DLL" 

No, it knows which *packages* depend on the DLL.

There's no good way under Linux (without walking thru /proc and trying to 
parse it, and hoping it doesn't change while you do so) of telling what DLLs 
  a given program is using that isn't in a package. There's also no good way 
of telling what programs are running right now.  There's also no good way of 
figuring out if a currently-running program is compatible with the new DLL 
you just downloaded, even if that running program hasn't loaded that DLL.

(For example, you have your media player running, and you update the media 
player executable and all the codecs. But now you go back to the running 
media player and play a different file, which loads the new codec DLL that 
is now incompatible with the running executable.)

UNIX has always been a "95% is good enough" OS. Linux is doing slightly 
better, but still isn't 100% there.

> (Also, if I run an executable it seems "locked", 

You can't write to a program that's executing, in UNIX. Never could.

What you *can* do is delete the executable while it's running (well, 
technically, "unlink" it), and create a new file with the same name.

In Windows, to delete a file, you have to have write permission, and since 
you don't get write permission to an executing file in Windows (just like in 
UNIX), you can't delete the file.

In UNIX, you don't need any permissions on a file to unlink it from the 
directory its name is in.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Forget "focus follows mouse." When do
   I get "focus follows gaze"?

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