Duplicates of third-party libraries

[Grant Edwards]

On 2009-12-08, Martin P. Hellwig <martin.hellwig at dcuktec.org> wrote:

> - In the ideal world, a upgrade of a dependency won't break
>   your program, in reality users fear upgrading dependencies
>   because they don't know for sure it won't result in a dll
>   hell type of problem.

In my experience with binary-based distros (RedHat, Windows,
Debian, etc.), upgrading libraries broke things as often as
not.  I've had significantly better results with Gentoo.
However, were I shipping a significant product that dependended
up updates to external libraries, I'd be very worried.

It also seems like a lot of work to provide the product in all
of the different package-management formats used by customers.
Even considering the extra updates that might be required for
library fixes, shipping a single stand-alone system sounds like
a lot less work.

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