RPM Rant (was: Re: Evolution on RedHat 7.2)

[Victor Odhner]

Tom Achtenberg wrote:
> I disagree, it should be the end product people who package any
> supplementary file their product needs together.  I would not
> expect MS to include everything a Symantec product would need,
> that would be Symantec's job.  The same should hold for Linux.

Tom, I think the dependencies are mostly library modules
and other things that are used in common between different
Linux applications.  So it would not be the responsibility
of the Evolution folks to provide the library -- it's an
open source product that should be generally available at
the required version level, and might well be on your
machine already.

One thing that often goes wrong in the Windows world is that
package A installs a DLL, then package B provides another
version of the same DLL which is incompatible with package A.
In some cases Windows apps MUST provide their required DLLs,
because they are proprietary and you can't just "go get them".
With free software that's not an issue, so the library
modules don't need to be included in the package.

But how does the common-library-version-compatibility issue
play out in the Linux world?  I'd be interested in hearing
comments on this, because I haven't done a lot of updating
under Linux.  Seems to me that doing an apt-get to install
one application, with its required libraries, might cause
a library to become incompatible with another application
already resident on the machine.

Vic