ok, so this is a bit late. i meant to post it yesterday, but got distracted.
yesterday's tutorial was Designing and Creating Great Shared Libraries, by Ted Ts'o. it was really neat. he started out by giving us a look at what one could do with elf symbol versioning, both the hows and the whys behind it, and then spent the second half of the talk going over good design practices that would keep you from needing to fall back to something as crazy as symbol versioning.
overall, i think the tutorial was quite worthwhile, if only for the 'good design' section. the symbol versioning stuff is neat from a technical standpoint, as i know we do some of that sort of thing on our VMS system at work, and it's interesting to see how one can do similar stuff on unix, but honestly i don't see myself needing to think about it all that often. there's this really small category of projects where things like that are needed (glibc was his big example), and i don't generally hack on any of them. the design portion however was damn useful. it reinforced several good things i'd already picked up from subversion hacking, and introduced a few new tricks that i'll have to keep in mind in the future. it's nice to have had this refresher now, before svn hits 1.0 and we start becoming constrained by backwards compatablity issues (well, more than we already are).
