A next-generation package manager called Nix provides a simple distribution-independent method for deploying a binary or source package on different flavours of Linux, including Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, Fedora, and Red Hat. Even better, Nix does not interfere with existing package managers. Unlike existing package managers, Nix allows different versions of software to live side by side, and permits sane rollbacks of software upgrades.
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Member since:2006-02-05
the question is how many of these libraries are even 500k? The big ones (glibc, gtk, qt, etc) obviously stay shared. if you are talking about a 100meg overhead in both disc AND ram it is still almost irrelivent on a 400$ machine you buy today.
The one place where the exponential complexity of having everything shared makes sense is ease of upgrades. But again, if you don't test against the upgraded library, you may end up fixing a bug in the library, but introducing a bug into an application that links against it.
I am firmly on the side of "RAM is cheap, life is short" mentality. Core libraries are centralized, everything else gets distributed with the application. That is why I like the OSX model, because it makes everything so damn simple.
Member since:
2005-07-24
Well, yes and no. The disk space itself may not be that big a deal. (Though I'm not sure totally insignificant. Its not how much you have total, but how any wastage, overall, compares to how much you've *got left* after you have everything you want or need on it. In that way, it's kind of like money. $50 may seem like nothing at the beginning of the month... but seem like a lot at the end.
But beyond that... let's think about backup time. I believe in complete backups. No incrementals, or partial filesystem backups for me. Because there seems always to be something significant somewhere that I had not considered. These additional copies of libs take time to back up. I've moved to using rsync and usb drives, which helps a lot. But there is still a penalty for extra stuff that doesn't really need to be there.
And then there is the shared memory issue. All these copies of different versions of libs have separate copies in RAM, sidestepping the normally *excellent* memory efficiency of unix.
And the security update issue. Each app, along with all of the libraries that it depends upon, needs to be patched separately, for each and every redundant copy of the library out there. Be careful not to miss any.
Shared libraries offer so many advantages that it seems a shame to miss out on them just to turn apps into independent blobs at this time when system package management works so well.
Edited 2008-12-24 20:35 UTC