Firefox 2 on Dapper

[Donn]

> You have it backwards.  It isn't an issue of libBlah supporting older
> calls, it is a matter of package newappversion requiring calls that are
> found in libBlah-2, but not in the libBlah-1 that you have.  
So, it's really a result of the rapid change of Linux apps, this synching 
problem between libraries and apps?

> What should 
> work is that libBlah-2 should include the calls found in libBlah-1, and
> oldapps, buiilt for libBlah-1, should accept libBlah-2 as satisfying a
> dependency.
My problem is that new apps won't run on old distro's... you have explained 
that's because the new apps have new demands. Right?

> What often happens with Kubuntu upgrades, though, is that libBlah gets
> renamed to something like libcoreBlah and the newappversion doesn't see
> libBlah as a version of libcoreBlah. Among the things that backporters do
> is make changes to newappversion-backport so that it recognizes these
> things.
Oh, so they have to mess with the source code and re-compile things to meet 
older library supplies.

> Another problem is that entire subsystems may change with new app versions.
> For instance amarok 1.4 just couldn't be made to run on the kde version
> that came with breezy because it had changed so fundamentally.
Wow. 

Alright. I get the overall impression of a wild, crazy, tazmanian devil ball 
of whirling software shooting across space. The change is rapid and 
unpredictable and it's amazing what the distros do to produce 
working "snapshots" of this mayhem every now and then.

What is the reason for the seeming stability (i.e. backwards support) of 
Windows then? 
I have read recently (can't find link) about how hard Microsoft has to work to 
keep backwards compat going. Apparently they even hardcoded special cases 
into their kernel to run games like Sim City (or The Sims, I forget). So the 
answer to my question could be exactly this: Microsoft has made it a mission 
to keep compatibility, but Linux being mostly unpaid and chaotic has no such 
luxury.

Still, seen from the pov of Windows, is it unnatural to want to move to newer 
version of software you need and use but *not* want to have to face an entire 
O/S upgrade (with hellish complexity) every time? It seems like a real 
problem, a catch-22. I know it causes me stress and I'm a 100% Linux user. I 
had another friend who tried Ubuntu for a while but got so irritated that she 
could not go to new versions (of FF and Thunderbird) that she gave up.

Thx for the info.

/d