Friday, August 05, 2005

Linux library dependency problem

An article here-- Shared libraries in Linux: growing pains or fundamental problem?, explain what I want to say about dependency problem in open source software. The article date 16 May 1999 by Sergey Ayukov, is year 2005 the problem still exist in Linux world. Open source software have too many dependency on different (shared) libraries, these libraries were used by more than one application. The main problem is, not all these shared libraries are (backward or forward) compatible. Most of the time user are force to upgrade the hold system libraries for compatibility issue, or even force to upgrade (sounds familiar right!?) the distribution version. This major problem caused by many of the shared library or application link to some major libraries (eg. glibc) which is not fully compatible with new version of the software release. Many user try to install pre-compiled binaries to save their time, to re-compile some new software like Gnome is too time consuming and almost impossible for normal user. This lead to other problems, like user have to upgrade their OS version, and open source become a close source system. May be there are just too many release for Linux distribution. Just Red Hat ( and Fedora Core) have 2 release yearly, and other operating system like Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X is about 1 (major) release yearly.

No comments: