4 ms·

Frankly no. The problem is not with distros, but with upstream. Having tried to self-maintain a distro that allows me to do so, Gobolinux, i have witnessed fir

Frankly no. The problem is not with distros, but with upstream. Having tried to self-maintain a distro that allows me to do so, Gobolinux, i have witnessed first hand the kinds of mess upstream makes of dependencies. All too often even a slight bump in minor versions will cause subtle bugs and breakages in behavior. Update some underlying lib just a few notches and suddenly your file manager's trash can is gone. Downgrade the underlying lib and it returns. But then some other program you want to upgrade insist on using the latest and "greatest" libs, or have depreciated support for one protocol in favor of another, just because the maintainer likes it better. Thus even with Gobolinux offering me the ability to stack lib versions and whatsnot, all too often i just simply have to freeze everything in place once i have it reasonably where i want it. Change anything, and i have to change everything, and thus a full reinstall may well be in order.

stephengillie 9y ago
Windows addresses this by maintaining a "side-by-side" set of library versions, so applications can have several versions of a library available to them. This is what the \Windows\WinSxS\ folder stores.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  At first glance WinSxS strikes me as a centralized variant of what Windows have done since the early days, search the local sub-folders near a binary first before looking elsewhere for a relevant dll. Basically this is not much different from what is being suggested with Flatpak, Snap, Docker, etc etc etc. Never mind that unix already offer something similar with SONAME. This is a naming scheme for lib files that put a interface version of sorts into the name. Then symlinks are used to point general names to more specific version names. This on paper allows the binary to get the right lib version for the job. But all too often either the lib maintainer do not update the soname properly, or the maintainer of whatever program that use the library is not specific enough regarding the soname. Frankly the problem is not so much technical is it is managerial. Of the two major UI libs on Linux, Qt keeps surprising me with its backwards-compatibility. I can apparently get Qt5 compiled againt Xorg versions that sends GTK3 screaming about missing dependencies. This, i suspect, is because Qt is a for profit project that is dual licensed. Thus there is an incentive to be as broad as possible with support.

stephengillie 9y ago

Windows addresses this by maintaining a "side-by-side" set of library versions, so applications can have several versions of a library available to them. This is what the \Windows\WinSxS\ folder stores.

digi_owl 9y ago
At first glance WinSxS strikes me as a centralized variant of what Windows have done since the early days, search the local sub-folders near a binary first before looking elsewhere for a relevant dll. Basically this is not much different from what is being suggested with Flatpak, Snap, Docker, etc etc etc. Never mind that unix already offer something similar with SONAME. This is a naming scheme for lib files that put a interface version of sorts into the name. Then symlinks are used to point general names to more specific version names. This on paper allows the binary to get the right lib version for the job. But all too often either the lib maintainer do not update the soname properly, or the maintainer of whatever program that use the library is not specific enough regarding the soname. Frankly the problem is not so much technical is it is managerial. Of the two major UI libs on Linux, Qt keeps surprising me with its backwards-compatibility. I can apparently get Qt5 compiled againt Xorg versions that sends GTK3 screaming about missing dependencies. This, i suspect, is because Qt is a for profit project that is dual licensed. Thus there is an incentive to be as broad as possible with support.