That ole Livna Problem/That ole VLC Problem

[Les Mikesell]

Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On 16/01/2008, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> And there could have been been a provision for
>> namespaces in rpms and libraries so multiple versions of things could
>> co-exist -
> 
> "namespaces in rpms" would not be enough. The OS environment would
> need to support the same namespaces, too, or else there would still be
> a run-time race between multiple minor versions of the same library.

If your library has a different name, how can it conflict? Or even if 
your application puts your library location first in a search path?

> Notice that several libraries and applications can even be built with
> a different feature-set.

Which is why multiple versions should be expected to co-exist.

> Even multiple major releases of libraries
> cannot coexist peacefully, if not all packagers take extra (sometimes
> huge) efforts to avoid conflicts between data/doc/development files,
> and e.g. package them as "libfoo2" and "libfoo3".

Doesn't that tell you something?

>> but everyone wants to pretend that theirs is the only version
>> that matters.
> 
> It's not that simple. There are many factors.

I used to hear about .dll conflict problems under windows all the time 
but I haven't in ages.  Did they learn something?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com