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Phil Evans wrote:
How do commercial software houses manage? Do they package all the dependencies with their applications (perhaps this is why Adobe CS2 is >5GB)?
on the other 90% of the world's computers the problem of colliding, shared, dynamic dependencies goes under the quaint name of "dll hell" and Microsoft's attempt at a solution amounts to introducing an additional operating system (as if the first one didn't provide enough rope) with a bureaucratically-empowered loader (e.g http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dndotnet/html/dplywithnet.asp ) This tends to corroborate the view that building multi-platform binary distributions with dynamic dependencies is a "hard" problem not likely to be amenable to a simple/general solution. Thankfully, if the pre-built packages/rpms fail, the availability of source reduces the problem to an annoyance, one that probably is not going away.
-- Alastair Fyfe Graduate Student Biomolecular Engineering Dept. University of California, Santa Cruz
