Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 24th Jun 2009 12:24 UTC, submitted by ralsina
There are a lot of people who believe that program and application management is currently as good as it gets. Because the three major platforms - Windows, Linux, Mac OS X - all have quite differing methods of application management, advocates of these platforms are generally unwilling to admit that their methods might be flawed, leading to this weird situation where over the past, say, 20 years, we've barely seen any progress in this area. And here we are, with yet another article submitted to our backend about how, supposedly, Linux' repository method sucks or rules.
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Member since:
2006-01-02
This is so typical of "end-user thinking" that I don't know where to start. It's OK to be an end user but here we're talking about package management and that's a technical discussion, no way around it.
So the basic fact is this: in linux package managers, the lock is necessary because linux packages are interdependent. Yes, if they were completely independent app bundles, packing their own libs instead of sharing system libs (except for a small set of system libs), the lock wouldn't be needed.
However:
There are huge advantages in the "interdependent" linux way. It means that installed software can take 5x, even 10x less disk space. Ever heard about live CDs and all that fits on them. It also means that software takes far less space when loaded in memory because the libraries are loaded once even if used by 5 apps (except when braindead companies like NVIDIA compile without -fPIC to gain 1% speed). It also means that libraries need to be patched only once, and the patch then applies everywhere.