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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RE[3]: Too bad you didn't like it
by dagw on Wed 24th Jun 2009 15:26
in reply to "RE[2]: Too bad you didn't like it"
Member since:2005-07-06
It means that installed software can take 5x, even 10x less disk space.
We're talking about few megabytes here in a time when most harddrives are measured in terabytes. Applications take up a tiny fraction of my hard drive and most of the space in used by any significantly sized application is for stuff that cannot be shared between apps
Ever heard about live CDs
Live CDs should be the exception, not the target we optimize for.
It also means that software takes far less space when loaded in memory because the libraries are loaded once even if used by 5
The difference in real terms is trivial, especially in a world where 1 GB of RAM is considered low end.
Optimizing for low end hardware is a worthy goal and all, but I'll happily sacrifice few hundred megs of harddrive space and a few dozen megs of RAM if it means I can have a more pleasant computer experience, as I'm sure would most people.
RE[4]: Too bad you didn't like it
by abstraction on Wed 24th Jun 2009 15:47
in reply to "RE[3]: Too bad you didn't like it"
Member since:2008-11-27
RE[4]: Too bad you didn't like it
by sorpigal on Thu 25th Jun 2009 12:05
in reply to "RE[3]: Too bad you didn't like it"
Member since:2005-11-02
RE[4]: Too bad you didn't like it
by uytvbn on Thu 25th Jun 2009 16:18
in reply to "RE[3]: Too bad you didn't like it"
Member since:2009-06-25
We're talking about few megabytes here in a time when most harddrives are measured in terabytes. Applications take up a tiny fraction of my hard drive and most of the space in used by any significantly sized application is for stuff that cannot be shared between apps
I believe this way of thinking is behind a phenomenon known as Wirth's law.
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.