On Mon, 2005-08-22 at 09:14, Dave Gutteridge wrote:
> I do appreciate everyone trying to steer me right so that I can
> understand the deal with Linux and CentOS.
>
> A lot of fair points have been made, and I've got to think about it a
> bit. Some people seem to be saying I can do the things I want to do, it
> just takes some work. Some people say I should lower my expectations of
> Linux. I suppose it's a little of both. Manage my expectations and be
> prepared for things to not be so clear.
>
> We'll see if I can get this dvd-rip software to fly. If so, I may be
> over the worst of my conversion pains.
If you used Windows a few years back you should be familiar with
what was called DLL-hell where 3rd party apps commonly replaced
system libraries because they needed extra features or the stock
version just didn't work. This was so bad that current windows
versions have a mechanism to restore the stock versions if anyone
tries to replace them. It was rare in the commercial world for
one 3rd party to depend on another 3rd party library enhancement,
but in open source it is normal and expected for everyone to
use the same shared libraries - and to improve them as needed, so
the problem becomes even worse.
One of the advantages of a fast-release distribution like Fedora
is that when you update the whole distribution, you get shared
libraries and applications that were all built together. The
trade-off is that you may have problems with any internally developed
or previously added 3rd party software that depended on an api
that changed. People who have to keep existing things working
may prefer the slower update cycle of RHEL/Centos, etc.
The real complication has to do with things of questionable legal
status or that have distribution restrictions that don't meet the
OS distribution guidelines. You aren't going to find those shared
libraries in the stock repositories, yet 3rd party applications are
going to need them. Your best bet is to try to find a single 3rd
party repository for yum or apt access that has all of the
dependencies available and hope that it does not modify the system
in a way that breaks anything else. An alternative that sometimes
works is to get the source rpm and rebuild it yourself, linking
to your existing libraries. This sometimes works because the app
may not actually need the exact version of the library that was in
place when it was built for the repository copy.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com