Kurt Granroth wrote:
> 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.

Microsoft was actually smart enough to do this (the versioning thing)
with most of their runtime library DLLs.  The problem arose when 3rd
parties created DLLs and decided to install everything in
Windows\Systems (or wherever).  But the DLL hell for Windows was a
complaint of people who did quite a lot on their boxes to the point
where they'd actually run into this problem.  Most windows users (except
for the power users) were just utilitarians who would rarely have run
into these problems.

Linux is different.  Most Linux users do quite a bit to their boxes and
so running into these problems will become more and more frequent in the
future, unless something is done now.

-- 
Tom Bradford --- The dbXML Project --- http://www.dbxml.org/
We store your XML data a hell of a lot better than /dev/null