Re: [Firebird-devel] MSVCRT

[David R. R. <ibi...@ma...>]

> The short answer is that you don't have a choice.  No installation
> procedure is allowed to replace a newer version of the library,
> so even if you ship with an old version, you run with what's on
> the system.  Among other things, this is how a single executable
> can run on Win95, NT, Win2K, WinXP, etc etc etc.

That's not true.  Remember the msvcrt.dll fiasco with the initial
versions of IB 6 on Win2000 Server?  It was all caused because the
person that created the IB installers set the date of the old 5.x
version of msvcrt.dll to June 2000.  MSI and Windows File Protection is
supposed to prevent the 5.x version overwriting the 6.x verison that
comes with Win2000 server, but due to bugs in MSI, MSI happly overwrites
msvcrt.dll in that case.  This was a major factor in my decision to
publish my IB Wise scripts (they looked at the version of msvcrt.dll and
didn't update it if the system contained a newer version).

> Microsoft's commitment to upwards compatibility in environments
> has historically been superb; I don't think they've made a non-
> compatible change in the basic libraries since the invention of
> the dll

I don't want to get into specific, but I completely disagree.

David R.