Nondeterministic installations

Thanks. I didn't want to go into every detail, but we already have our own solutions utilizing wrappers, environment variables, and symbolic links. These provide the programs with the runtime environment they need and enable us to install several versions and variations of the same software stack in parallel, which users can select from at runtime. These tools can also hide hardware complexity from the applications by providing hardware-specific variants of libraries etc.

If software just follows standards, everything is fine. For example, use execlp() to activate external programs, as it respects the PATH environment variable. Activate shared libraries with the dynamic linker which honors LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Open files by their canonical names, which allows redirection by symbolic links.

If, on the other hand, an installer 'locates' all the files at installation time and configures them with resolved paths, the setup may fail if the environment changes. This can occur, for example, if you switch to a machine with a different GPU, necessitating a different driver version and library variants.

But even outside our environment the prototypical user with their personal notebook and nothing else should be annoyed, when updating one thing calls for re-installation of another thing, because the vendor-supplied oracle needs to look at the environment a second time. Backup and Restore to a replacement system will no longer work.