Dependencies [LWN.net]

Dependencies

Posted Dec 18, 2002 17:54 UTC (Wed) by dbreakey (guest, #1381)
In reply to: Dependencies by ekj
Parent article: Coming soon: gnucash 1.8

This is not a library issue, but a packaging issue; unfortunately, I don't think that anyone has come up with a reasonable, usable solution for this. Consider the following:

Most libraries are backwards-compatible, at least to some degree. Developers of these libraries generally, as far as I can tell, try to ensure that libraries sharing the same major release number remain backwards-compatible.
Your distribution vendor is putting their reputation on the line by packaging everything together to provide a working system.
Your distribution vendor probably just doesn't have the time (most don't) to verify that earlier library versions still work with the latest and greatest version of any given application. Sadly, most vendors probably don't even have enough time to rely on the release notes to tell them this either.

Therefore, in order to continue producing a distribution that meets their desired level of quality (whatever that might be), most vendors only spend their time testing and validating the latest—or at least whatever point on the curve they want to be at; some vendors prefer to hang back a bit from the absolute latest sutff, while others like to live on the bleeding edge—releases of any given application.

The downside to this is that users, in order to upgrade to the latest version of one particular application, may be required to upgrade a large portion of their system in order to satisfy dependancies—dependancies which are determined by the vendor and hard-coded into the package information.

If you don't want to do this, you may want to start using one of the increasing number of "build from source" distributions, which will probably give you far more control over the exact content of your system.

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