> It's not about combinations. It's about, there's a serious bug in the library and now there are 79 different actively used versions of it that need to be patc

> It's not about combinations. It's about, there's a serious bug in the library and now there are 79 different actively used versions of it that need to be patched instead of 2, which means half of them never get fixed. Yes I agree that would be a royal pain in the ass, i.e. running something like a Debian where each package would be the equivalent of a docker image with an individual maintainer who'd need to decide when they upgrade OpenSSL. I'm saying you could have something like a Debian where the build infrastructure and package maintenance works exactly the same, your package is always built against the latest library versions. But users get a NixOS-like experience where they can partially update their system, now with traditional OS package management an update of a common library & a full system-update are often in practice the same thing. > Is it really better in that short time for the other 5% of applications to "work" but be insecure and get your system compromised because the new vulnerability is being actively exploited? On the flip side is it really better that if you're using the other 95% of applications that your security fix is delayed because upstream is finding it a pain to rebuild the patched package for 5% of its users? That's realistically the alternative. > [...]but that should happen only rarely so that at most two or three mutually incompatible versions are in active use at once[...] The sum of differing versions in use among a distro's userbase is vastly larger than that, some of those users are deferring security updates because their distro makes upgrading an all-or-nothing experience.