Tom Horsley wrote:
Just out of curiosity, how feasible do you think it might be to give up on the overwhelmingly complex task of making all 3rd party software installation compatible, and instead make linux userland be able to install multiple incompatible packages (heck, be able to install both rpms and debs for that matter) in multiple "virtual roots"?
Why not just give up on any Linux install being compatible with any other and compile everything statically instead - like the commercial apps are forced to do since they can't count on anything in common among distributions?
A few years ago I'd have argued the other way, but now the cost of disk and RAM are orders of magnitude lower and the old line about how you can fix a bug in all apps with a single library update is offset by the fact that a 'yum update' would replace them all with the recompiled fix anyway.
It would at least be interesting to have the option of bloated but bulletproof apps as a defense against developers that clearly don't care about compatibility and likely never will.
-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
