On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 15:26, Lamar Owen wrote:
> On Monday 13 March 2006 13:59, Les Mikesell wrote:
> > Maybe someday a distribution will figure out that users really
> > want a stable OS along with current apps instead of bundling
> > new device drivers along with version-level desktop app
> > updates. Until then, or at least until packaging lets you
> > install new/expermental versions alongside your well-tested
> > working application, people will continue to do strange and
> > desperate things...
>
> Let me make a minor edit to this well-thought-out paragraph, Les. The change
> is from 'distribution' to 'upstream open-source developers who have a NIH
> attitude and who insist on their required version of any given library as
> being The Only Acceptable Version'.
I'm not sure I even care about that. While I'd rather not have
every app statically link every library, I can afford the disk
space to have versioned shared libs for everything that really
needs them. That seems to be more reasonable than to expect
Linux developers to accept the definition of interfaces as
contracts among programmers that aren't supposed to ever
change.
> Typically the distribution has very
> little control on what the upstream requires (this isn't strictly true for
> Red Hat or Novell, since they employee a good sized percentage of upstream
> developers.
>
> Thus the need to keep so many versions of, say, GTK or OpenSSL in the
> distribution.
I can live with that. That doesn't explain why I can't have
an RPM-installed evolution 2.x alongside the stock Centos 3.x
version.
> It goes back to the upstream's willingness to work with older
> versions of libraries. And, in this case, I'm not referring to Red Hat as
> the upstream; I referring to MySQL AB, the PostgreSQL Global Development
> Group, the KDE project, the GCC and GLIBC developers, the Linux developers,
> etc.
Respecting existing interfaces in existing libraries during
new development would pretty much eliminate the need to keep
old versions around, but I don't see much hope for that. A better
workaround to let multiple versions of everything co-exist is
probably the best we might see.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
