New versions breaking extensions, etc.

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Cameron Laird wrote:
> Part of the trick is that it demands deep understanding
> to detect the antisynergies that arise from the interac-
> tions of the DLL, registry, and filesystem schemes.  I
> know it was only this year that I realized the whole
> installation-requires-reboot absurdity is a consequence
> of DLL (mis-)design.

Can you elaborate? To me, that problem only originates from
the OS lack of support for deleting open files. If you could
delete a shared libary that is still in use (as you can on
Unix), the put the new version of the DLL in the place, it
would all work fine: new processes would use the new DLL.
Existing processes continue to use the old DLL, which would
be only deleted if the last process using it terminates.
It might be sensible to restart a few long-running processes
so that they also use the new DLL, but apart from that,
installation does need to imply reboot even on a system
that uses DLLs.

Regards,
Martin