On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 02:22:42PM +0100, Mike Hearn wrote: > On Wed, 18 May 2005 22:02:37 +0100, Paul Brook wrote: > > Rubbish. You've obviously never tried to install two third party windows > > applications that require two different revisions of msvcrt.dll, or even > > worse two random versions of an OCX control. > > And Linux has dependency hell.
But many Linux/UNIX apps ship as source, so you can resolve those dep's by rebuilding. That may not be practical for all users, but for those prepared to do it, it works. > As a long time contributor to the Wine project, I think I know what > problems Windows has with dynamic linking. I never said it was perfect. > > Nonetheless, Windows (especially in the past few years) has significantly > fewer issues with this than Linux does. Partly that's because the > Microsoft toolchain doesn't helpfully give you dependencies on Windows XP > without you asking - for obvious reasons! Neither does Linux - by linking against a recent library you are *asking* for a binary that requires that library. If you understand that you might understand why everyone is saying you should build on the lowest common denominator of the systems you're targetting. If you insist on shipping executables not just source then you have to be prepared to make a bit more effort to make them distributable. You're aware of the problems, but seem to be resisting everyone's advice on how to avoid them. > Can you imagine the bad > publicity they'd get if it looked like they were trying to force people to > upgrade? jon
