DLL vs Shared Library

[Michael R Head]

On Thu, 2006-03-30 at 13:35 -0400, Derek Broughton wrote:
> Alan McKinnon wrote:
> 
> > Another huge problem, and this comes about from having no real package
> > manager with dependancy tracking on Windows, is a separate copy of a
> > vb runtime with every app, just in case.
> 
> And yet, I've seen _extremely_ knowledgeable Mac users giving that as an
> argument against a good package manager.  They think that having every
> application completely independent of every other app is better than the
> intertwined dependencies of Apt.

That's just because they have a completely different development model.
If you're developing commercial, closed source software, it's up to you
to make sure your product will work in all supported environments. In
that case, it's absolutely critical that you have a static platform and
provide all your non-platform-integrated dependencies along with the
rest of your application.

In the opensource world, the distributions actually do the installation
and integration support work. This allows the platform and the
applications built on top of it to mutate and evolve at a much faster
pace. In order to make the lives of distributors and users simple, we
have a package manager that sorts out the dependencies so our apps work
properly.

> 
> Oh, the poor benighted fools...
> -- 
> derek
> 
> 
-- 
Michael R Head <burner at suppressingfire.org>
burner | suppressingfire | firestorm | phoenix | firefighter