Or, even better:
...until an exploit is found in Mars. and then users have to find every copy of both Mars and Venus on their systems to apply the security update. Which they might not know they need to do if they're not aware that Venus uses its own independent copy of the Mars code.
The latter case came up a few months ago with zlib. Since it's FOSS and fairly simple, many developers chose to include their own copy of the zlib source instead of being dependent on the system having a working zlib installed. Then a major zlib exploit was found, and I had to spend a day or two tracking down everything that used zlib code on any of the machines I'm responsible for, checking if each one had an update available, and then either installing the updates or figuring out how to mitigate the vulnerability where updates weren't available. If they had all just used the system zlib, then I could have updated that and been done with it. That's only "a distinction without a difference" if you're not the poor schmuck who has to admin systems which use the code.
In reply to Re^4: What if Perl had an OO standard library?
by dsheroh
in thread What if Perl had an OO standard library?
by awncorp
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