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> Everything must be part of the same gigantic Goldberg-esque state so that everything can catch fire and burn down at once as soon as there's a conflict of any

> Everything must be part of the same gigantic Goldberg-esque state so that everything can catch fire and burn down at once as soon as there's a conflict of any kind. Well, that's exactly the job of competent package managers, to make sure that packages fully stated their dependencies (so that the package manager would forbid you from getting into an illegal state wherein a required dependency was not installed or the wrong version of the dependency was installed), and installed correctly according to the LFHS so that there would be no conflicts. /opt isn't new. Plenty of people decided that they could throw everything into a folder under /opt, including copies of all dependencies, with no references outside of that folder, and that would be enough. And it might have been enough if it wasn't for sysadmins in charge of uptime tearing their beards out over /opt constantly filling up and causing multi-product outages when it did. The whole point of the LFHS is that it represented a contract along the boundary between developers (who needed to bundle libraries, save state, have access to a cache, etc.) and operators (who worried about disks and associated costs - why would you ever spend a dime backing up /var/cache? Why would you ever use a fast disk for /etc?). When this contract was followed, systems worked splendidly. When the contract was broken, the people who broke the contract shot themselves in the foot just about the same as anybody writing C code knows how many footguns are in the C language. Of course, today, with the price of resources having crashed through the floor, and containerization having more or less reached maturity, this is all more or less an academic, historical, moot point. But dynamically linked libraries weren't stupid, they were an artifact of an age where statically linking libraries was horrendously uneconomical and the idea of namespacing anything was enough to get laughed out of the room by people wondering how you would expect to pay for any of it.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
> Well, that's exactly the job of competent package managers, to make sure that packages fully stated their dependencies (so that the package manager would forbid you from getting into an illegal state wherein a required dependency was not installed or the wrong version of the dependency was installed), and installed correctly according to the LFHS so that there would be no conflicts. Package managers are an over-engineered solution to a problem that only really exists if you rely on package managers. Ever had your apt database break on you? It's a joy, let me tell you. Nothing ever gets installed or removed again. Blowing up your system and requiring your OS to be reinstalled is ridiculous. Especially since that was a problem that didn't even used to exist. OSs were once stored on roms. > /opt isn't new. Plenty of people decided that they could throw everything into a folder under /opt, including copies of all dependencies, with no references outside of that folder, and that would be enough. Sure, as long as you never move it from opt. UNIX devs' addiction to hard-coding fixed paths is difficult to break. > And it might have been enough if it wasn't for sysadmins in charge of uptime tearing their beards out over /opt constantly filling up and causing multi-product outages when it did. Is that really a problem outside of Linux, which famously defined its base-system as "the kernel" and therefore necessitated that any such install would need to bring along all its own dependencies because it couldn't rely on anything existing except the kernel? > Of course, today, with the price of resources having crashed through the floor, and containerization having more or less reached maturity, this is all more or less an academic, historical, moot point. But dynamically linked libraries weren't stupid, they were an artifact of an age where statically linking libraries was horrendously uneconomical and the idea of namespacing anything was enough to get laughed out of the room by people wondering how you would expect to pay for any of it. Yet we still live with this bullshit today anyway and the Linux community especially eschews any attempt to move on. This despite some of the same people who created UNIX creating Plan 9, which rejected dynamically linking and embraced namespacing over twenty years ago!

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

> Well, that's exactly the job of competent package managers, to make sure that packages fully stated their dependencies (so that the package manager would forbid you from getting into an illegal state wherein a required dependency was not installed or the wrong version of the dependency was installed), and installed correctly according to the LFHS so that there would be no conflicts. Package managers are an over-engineered solution to a problem that only really exists if you rely on package managers. Ever had your apt database break on you? It's a joy, let me tell you. Nothing ever gets installed or removed again. Blowing up your system and requiring your OS to be reinstalled is ridiculous. Especially since that was a problem that didn't even used to exist. OSs were once stored on roms. > /opt isn't new. Plenty of people decided that they could throw everything into a folder under /opt, including copies of all dependencies, with no references outside of that folder, and that would be enough. Sure, as long as you never move it from opt. UNIX devs' addiction to hard-coding fixed paths is difficult to break. > And it might have been enough if it wasn't for sysadmins in charge of uptime tearing their beards out over /opt constantly filling up and causing multi-product outages when it did. Is that really a problem outside of Linux, which famously defined its base-system as "the kernel" and therefore necessitated that any such install would need to bring along all its own dependencies because it couldn't rely on anything existing except the kernel? > Of course, today, with the price of resources having crashed through the floor, and containerization having more or less reached maturity, this is all more or less an academic, historical, moot point. But dynamically linked libraries weren't stupid, they were an artifact of an age where statically linking libraries was horrendously uneconomical and the idea of namespacing anything was enough to get laughed out of the room by people wondering how you would expect to pay for any of it. Yet we still live with this bullshit today anyway and the Linux community especially eschews any attempt to move on. This despite some of the same people who created UNIX creating Plan 9, which rejected dynamically linking and embraced namespacing over twenty years ago!