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

[Thomas Mondoshawan Tate]

On Thu, Jan 24, 2002 at 10:29:43AM -0700, Victor Odhner wrote:
> 
> 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

The problem with the windows version of DLLs is that _all_ versions of a DLL
are named exactly the same filename. Eg: commctl.dll version 3 is the same
as version 4. When they change something in the versions, conflict occurs.
This will not happen on Linux because the version numbers of the DLLs (known
as SO files under Linux) have the version numbers in the name. Eg:
imlib.so.1.0.0 is version 1.0 of ImLib, whereas imlib.so.1.1.0 is version
1.1. Since they have different version numbers in the filename, both can
coexist peacefully. Windows, to a small extent, has adopted this naming
convention but with smaller results because it really was too little too late.

-- 
Thomas "Mondoshawan" Tate
mondoshawan@tank.dyndns.org
http://tank.dyndns.org