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Indeed, containers suck for this: Not just do you have to look into each container separately, there is also no requirement all containers use the same structur

by xg15 3y ago

Indeed, containers suck for this: Not just do you have to look into each container separately, there is also no requirement all containers use the same structure at all, as you said. Yet this is exactly what happens in practice if the one-version-for-all paradigm is impractical for developers. So it would be in the interest of distros to give some way in that regard: Keep the centralised dependency dogma in place, but allow multiple independent versions and configurations be stored. Then bug fixing might be slightly harder than with a single version, because you might have to fix 3 versions instead of one, but still much easier than monkey-patching half a dozen containers. (It would still be good to "nudge" developers towards a canonical version, i.e. by sending them reminders when the software uses a lower version or a different configuration - or if you want even a warning that everything below a certain minimum version will be rejected)

rwmj 3y ago
Distros do this already, at least some do. It depends on the distro exactly how it is done, but Debian certainly allows multiple versions of libraries to be packaged (with variant names: https://packages.debian.org/buster/libreadline7 https://packages.debian.org/buster/libreadline7 vs https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/libreadline8 https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/libreadline8), and in Fedora, compat-* packages are used to store previous versions of libraries (eg: https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=23575 https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=23...) There's usually some soft or hard insistence that the package that depends on the old version of the dependency should have a plan to update to the new version. Definitely in Fedora we don't "like" compat libraries, although we tolerate them. An interesting fact is the original RPM specification was designed to allow parallel installation of different versions of the same-named package. However at a distro level it turned out to be quite difficult to use this, because you have to be really careful about file conflicts. So now it is disallowed, except for the kernel package.

by xg15 3y ago

rwmj 3y ago

Distros do this already, at least some do. It depends on the distro exactly how it is done, but Debian certainly allows multiple versions of libraries to be packaged (with variant names: https://packages.debian.org/buster/libreadline7 https://packages.debian.org/buster/libreadline7 vs https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/libreadline8 https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/libreadline8), and in Fedora, compat-* packages are used to store previous versions of libraries (eg: https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=23575 https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=23...) There's usually some soft or hard insistence that the package that depends on the old version of the dependency should have a plan to update to the new version. Definitely in Fedora we don't "like" compat libraries, although we tolerate them. An interesting fact is the original RPM specification was designed to allow parallel installation of different versions of the same-named package. However at a distro level it turned out to be quite difficult to use this, because you have to be really careful about file conflicts. So now it is disallowed, except for the kernel package.