The justification for dependencies in software packages is that they can be shared, saving RAM and disk space. But disks and RAM is growing very large, while not much is actually shared. Besides many instances of the same program sharing the runtime code, do programs really need to share anything, beyond agreeing on standard interfaces for the display manager and the operating system?
Whenever I find myself in dependency hell while installing an infrequently used program, I wish for a compile or install switch that downloads every oddball library that the program requires, and merges them all into one big binary blob that uses the simplest possible interfaces with my existing OS. It might chew up more resources when it is running, but I would rather buy another stick of RAM than upgrade a whole operating system, along with the hundreds of little programs that I wrote for myself and would rather not recompile. But then, I suppose most people don't have a 40 year accumulation of little programs; ditching every app and starting over with new versions may not be that painful for them. They may not even use that many apps. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
