The Slashdot (stupid) way to resolve dependency-hell

dh003i2

Welp, the stupidity at /. never ceases to amaze me. It was recently suggested that dependency hell be resolved by having every application come with all of the libraries it needs. This is a very stupid idea, for 6 obvious reasons.

1. Bandwidth. No-one wants to have to take 2-4x as long to download programs.

2. Hard-drive space. Even if we all had 40GB hard-drives, no-one wants to waste it reproducing the same information a hundred times. People buy hard-drives to store data, not twenty copies of the same library.

3. RAM. Loading two copies of the same library wastes gobs of RAM.

4. Load-time. Having to load all of the libraries will increase load-time compared to cases where some were already opened (by other apps) and you don't have to load them.

5. Consistency. Part of the benefit of having shared libraries is shared behavior. Destroyed if every app uses its own version of glibc.

6. The Big 3S: Security, Stability, and Speed. Who knwos what insecure, unstable, and poorly performing version of a library each app comes with. And who knows what crappy options it was compiled with. Resolving these issues at one central point can be counted out. You want to deal with any of these issues, you'd have to do it for every application's version of a library.

The way to solve dependency-hell is to write better package management systems. Gentoo is part way there, though we need better reverse-package management (removing no-longer needed packages).
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handsomepete · Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2003 3:28 am Post subject:

A lot of things on slashdot irritate you, don't they. Why air it out here in addition to/instead of there? Just curious.

dh003i2 · Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2003 3:38 am Post subject: because

Because, most people at Slashdot are too stupid too understand this. I explained it in a thread, but a bunch of idiots replied with variously assorted bullshit like, "hard-drive and RAM don't matter".
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Jimbow · Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2003 4:36 am Post subject:

I read some of that article. The guy that wrote it is a mor^H^H doesn't know what he is talking about. Flame bait.
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maw · Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2003 9:59 am Post subject:

Shame I didn't have any moderator points today... :twisted:

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bsolar · Bodhisattva Joined: 12 Jan 2003 Posts: 2764

About /. there is already this thread. :wink:

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