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DLL Hell in Open Source
You don’t here it as often these days, but one of the oft cited errors with Microsoft’s Operating Systems was what became generally known as “DLL HELL”
The problem summary: When a user installs an application on their machine, most of these applications do their “thang” through libraries they either create or source from someone else.
As MS Window’s popularity grew with software developers, so too the need for libraries to do their “thang” and subsequent fixes/tweaks to these libraries to do their “thang” correctly, add that extra feature, fix that extra feature ad-nauseum.
The problem, in the MS Windows ecosystem, as has come to *Nix, are the incompatibilities between different versions of these libraries and their proliferation on users machines.
In the beginning, there were weak guidelines where certain types of libraries went here, and others went in the “application” space. Disk use outgrew disk space for a time, and consolidation of space was required. Today, it seems disk space is well beyond general user requirements.
The solution we begin to see in the MS Windows ecosystem, is for applications to install all their libraries within their own space (there’s enough disk space, just use it) to minimise picking up the ‘wrong’ library.
I wonder how long it will take for this new ‘developer feature’ to be incorporated into *Nix applications (if not doing so already.)
it would sure solve a lot of problems with a lot of Open Source packages if all the dependencies were supplied with the package in installed under /Applications/Uber App.
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