Paul Moore wrote: > > Is nobody but me seeing shades of Windows "DLL hell" in all of this?
Dll hell was caused because there was no versioning, and new dll overwrote older ones, while not being compatible. If we add a versioning checking, we won't have dll hell problem, but dependency hell, actually, which is not much better. As far as I understand, with .net, MS started to support multiple version (several runtimes could be installed at the same time), but it did not really solve the deployment issues. > > Seriously, the problems being discussed here seem very similar to > those encountered in the past by Windows with differing versions of > DLLs. A number of solutions have been tried, with varying degrees of > success. Anyone looking to address this problem for Python, really > should take a look at the DLL hell history in Windows, if only to see > what types of approach didn't work. One of the recent approach I am aware of is the GAC (global assembly cache) for .net support. It enable multiple versions of the same assembly (more or less equivalent to a python module) to be installed at the same time: http://www.mono-project.com/Assemblies_and_the_GAC This document is actually very interesting (I've just read it while looking for a link for the GAC). Although aimed at .net development, it is almost entirely applicable to the problems we are talking about here. Interestingly, it recommends against having multiple versions of the same assembly in the GAC without committment to stable API. cheers, David _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
