John P. Fisher wrote:
2) a few other rhetorical comments-
Isn't this a result of the torrent of new apps that has arrived since
RH7-8 and Debian Woody days?
No, you've just forgotten how bad RH7 and 8 were. After many, many,
updates RH7.3 became absolutely rock solid but RH8 was like starting
from scratch and was never really fixed - they just moved on to 9.
Isn't this fundamentally the same shared library disaster that they call
dll-hell on Windows? Boy howdy that Windows repository was a great
solution...
It's a different version of the same problem. Linux shared libs have a
versioning scheme that lets different apps run the versions each needs
at the same time. Unfortunately, there is no coordination among
repositories to make this work with anything that replaces a library
that is also in core or extras, so RPM sees conflicting versions of the
same thing.
At bottom isn't this a rate-of-change issue? The Mac world solves this
by welding the hood shut. As soon as you start adding uncommon software
there, OSX has problems too.
Have you experienced this with software obtained from the same source or
compiled locally?
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx