On Monday 25 June 2001 10:52 am, Tom Bradford wrote:
> Kurt Granroth wrote:
> > Right, you cannot.  Packages for RedHat 7 and above will *not* work for
> > any earlier version of RedHat.
>
> They used to call this DLL hell in the early Windows 95 days, but these
> days, it seems more and more like Linux is the biggest sufferer of it.
> I definitely have more library versioning issues on Linux than I ever
> did on Windows.  Who's gonna fix this problem?

Well, the Windows DLL hell was a little more insideous.  The problem there 
were DLLs that had the same name, yet were incompatible with each other.

In the case of Linux .so files, there are at least version numbers that allow 
incompatible versions to co-exist.

To wit, I once had my system setup to run a.out, elf, libc5, and glibc 
binaries.  Basically, I could run any Linux binary ever created up to that 
point.  It was a gigantic PITA doing it.. but it did work.

So it *is* possible.  What is needed for it to be come a reality on a mass 
scale is for users to care enough.  If enough people made a stink, then the 
distributions can start shipping the "compatability" layers.  I think SuSE 
already does to some degree...
-- 
Kurt Granroth            | http://www.granroth.org
KDE Developer/Evangelist | SuSE Labs Open Source Developer
granroth@kde.org         | granroth@suse.com
            KDE -- Conquer Your Desktop