It is the result of having no unified platform and library release coordination, no long term plans, nothing, just chaos. Everybody just releases when he is in the mood for it. And since nothing is complete when released, devs further down the chain always go for the latest and greatest to get additional functionality. And to upgrade app1, you have to upgrade lib1 which triggers the updates of app2, app3, app4, lib3, etc. Sometimes you cant update a simple app without updating the whole desktop. The Linux dependency net appears nightmarish to everyone coming from Windows, where you have a reliable, stable base system which doesnt change for a decade and every app targets the same base system.
Linux, the kernel, is only running that great because it has a dictator. But Linus' dictatorship ends at the kernel borders, he has little influence outside. The Linux desktop also needs a dictator to massively slow down the rate of uncoordinated changes and force-stabilize the ecosystem. I hoped that Mark Shuttleworth could be that man, but he then introduced Unity... but even with unity, Ubuntu is the only chance for the Linux desktop for having a single defined set of libs attractive and influential enough for app devs as a primary target so they can safely go with the library versions in Ubuntu, instead of constantly chasing the latest and greatest versions from the upstream.
You are using this term incorrectly: the cause of DLL Hell is when one DLL (often a newer one) should be used, but another is used instead (even if it is older). The causes of this were varied.
On 16-bit Windows there was a single address space and only a single version of a DLL could be loaded by all processes: the first one to load would "win", and the others would get screwed with the old copy. This was due to 16-bit Windows not having memory protection: it was more of a GUI over DOS, and thereby had cooperative multi-tasking.
Even with that fixed, many developers would require a slightly newer version of a library, and rather than ask the user to upgrade their system (an irritating consequence of not having packages or dependencies; APT FTW ;P) would just include the DLL in their installer and unconditionally overwrite any existing copy.
After the dynamic loader started supporting "local" versions of libraries (installed to the same folder as the application), a similar problem happened with COM objects, which are centrally registered: someone would install their own version of a shared GUI component, register it with the shared name, overwriting possibly-installed newer copies.
Both of these problems were actually solved, but way too many developers simply gave up on Microsoft and Windows beforehand, and then refuse to spend the time to learn about the improvements. In essence, Windows now has reasonable-ish package management, with dependencies: Windows Installer.
In addition to dependencies and versioning of packages (which can then be correctly tracked by Windows, much like APT on a Debian/Ubuntu box), Windows Installer supports the notion of "unified installer program" with "merge modules": in essence, you can include someone else's package inside of your package; that way the dependencies can correctly be checked, and old versions won't get overwritten.
There are still a few cases that are quite difficult to manage (involving libraries that require a modified ABI over time, but still receive updates), and Microsoft's solution to those is WinSxS. Honestly, while I'm much less familiar with it than on Unix, it only seems a constant multiple more crazy than .la files, which I believe solve a similar problem.
These technologies and improvements were all introduced at or before Windows XP, an operating system that was released just over a decade ago. Of course, these are all solutions that developers sometimes ignore, but if you download software for Linux that comes with a .sh installer that scribbles into /lib, you are in for similar "hell".
I've never had to upgrade Windows (including all installed apps) to be able to install some other random app.
On Linux, having to upgrade the distro (including getting a new desktop environment force-installed) to get a new version of any random app is established practice. Example: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3822
If you claim that you "never had to upgrade Windows to be able to install some other random app" you probably haven't used Windows much then. There are games that need explicit version or newer of DirectX. You can't even produce from the C or C++ sources the binary application that runs on any Windows XP with the latest Visual Studio (11). Any C/C++ application built with Visual Studio 2010 won't run on Windows 2000 or XP prior to SP3. We developers try to build the applications that run on as many targets as possible, but even MSFT doesn't support us enough for that, seeing the older versions as the competition to their newest "shiny thing." Which is not funny considering millions and millions of users still running Windows XP.
See the various opinions on MSFT intentionally removing the binary compatibility which already existed in their libraries here:
Do you happen to know how many users are running Windows < XP/SP3? For our install base (games company) it's less than 1%. Is there a compelling reason not to upgrade to SP3 if you're on XP?
Dependencies are bundled on Windows. It means installing App B doesn't affect your App A. It also means that security bugs must be fixed at the app level, not at the library or OS level.
Then you're lucky, because plenty of applications required you to install the Service Pack 2 on XP to install them, .NET application often required newer versions, same with games and DirectX, etc.
Not entirely true. While Microsoft won't upgrade your Windows for free (creating the demand for support for ancient versions of the OS - things that will run on XP) they will make software dependent on service packs and fixes. It's not a new version with new functionality, but it's an upgrade nonetheless.
Not sure why this was down voted so much, there is an element of truth to it.
When you are dealing with different distributions that provide different versions of core libraries, different sound architectures , package managers and put things like executables and config files into different parts of the filesystem.
I thought that the Linux standard base would be the way to solve this.
Probably because though there is an element of truth in it, it just sounds plain wrong.
After two sentences i thought "he probably works for microsoft or another big corporation", not because it's flame, but because of the attitude to regard this as pure chaos (and having no big plan as bad). I even looked up the profile.
There is kind of a release-plan, not for the whole eco-system, but that's what stable distros are for. So the remark to Ubuntu is right. But it's wrong to mix library-stability with perceived frontend-issues with Unity. Ubuntu still fulfills that role for some apps. And besides that, it isn't necessarily wrong to write new programs against new libraries. They have new features and new bugfixes.
I wouldn't want the ecosystem to stagnate right now. Or ever.
> not for the whole eco-system, but that's what stable distros are for
The problem is that no app dev targets stable distros, but always goes for the latest and greatest from the upstream so distros are constantly forced to update libs and change the base system.
So with a stable distro, you cant get a new version of an app, because the libs of your distro are too old, and you need to upgrade the whole distro just to be able to get that new app you want.
The Linux ecosystem needs one distro (say Ubuntu) to become so influential, that app devs start to primarily target it instead of the upstream. Only then will the library space stop being a moving target for end users, and only then it will be possible to upgrade app1 without triggering an automatic update of app2, which both happen to depend on the same lib. Only then will these useless practices of "packaging" and "backporting" finally stop, and devs will be simply make packages themselves, like they do on windows or osx. Only then will users be able to install a distro once, and then be able to install new apps for 5-10 years without having to upgrade the whole distro every 6 months.
> I wouldn't want the ecosystem to stagnate right now. Or ever.
But with an ecosystem as unstable as the current one you wont get more than 1% of the market right now. Or ever.
Normal users and especially businesses simply dont want to constantly update their systems. Force them to do that, and they simply walk away.
The Linux ecosystem needs one distro (say Ubuntu) to become so influential, that app devs start to primarily target it instead of the upstream. Only then will the library space stop being a moving target for end users, and only then it will be possible to upgrade app1 without triggering an automatic update of app2, which both happen to depend on the same lib. Only then will these useless practices of "packaging" and "backporting" finally stop, and devs will be simply make packages themselves, like they do on windows or osx. Only then will users be able to install a distro once, and then be able to install new apps for 5-10 years without having to upgrade the whole distro every 6 months.
What happens in Windows is not what you're describing; developers are simply forced to distribute their own copies of the libraries (as DLLs or statically compiled) since there is no package manager. What then happens is that there are dozens of copies of the same libraries, most of them lacking bugfixes and even security patches.
The dependency system used by Linux distros may have its problems, but it surely beats ad-hoc dependency management, even if it requires backporting.
Normal users and especially businesses simply dont want to constantly update their systems. Force them to do that, and they simply walk away.
Right. If you use Windows, have you tried counting the number of update managers running in the background, the number of applications that ask you on launch to "verify updates", the number of times Windows Update alerts you, etc?
Windows machines are constantly updating. Unlike Ubuntu, they just do it incrementally instead of once every six months (except for security patches).
But that's better fixed by moving to a rolling release scheme.
I would rather ship an extra copy of all of the libraries than tell the user that he has to update libc6 (and therefor almost all of the other software he uses) to run my software.
Nothing in Linux prevents you from doing so. Just ship your application with it and use a one line shell script to run it with the appropriate LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
It's just not commonly done (with exceptions like http://sta.li/), and as a user, I'm thankful for that.
The bigger development teams don't focus on a single distro, as their development base is probably diverse enough to demand a certain degree of platform compatibility.
However, many of the smaller development teams will focus almost exclusively on Ubuntu, as it is the distro they will most likely have.
I know, from my own limited experience, that I have only ever attempted to make my systems work on Ubuntu and just allowed others to push their changes into the main development if they have specific platform that they prefer to use.
I wouldnt say that's true. LedgerSMB 1.3 when it shipped last year supported PostgreSQL 8.3 and higher, Perl 5.8, etc... 1.4 will probably require Perl 5.10 and PostgreSQL 8.4...... We specifically target older versions to make it easy for adoption.
In fact, usually when we run into problems, it's a new version, not an old one.
> The Linux ecosystem needs one distro (say Ubuntu) to become so influential, that app devs start to primarily target it instead of the upstream.
This used to be RedHat: software for Linux would often come as either 1) source code (if open), 2) a crazy .sh install script, and 3) an RPM package for RedHat 5.
It is the result of having no unified platform and library release coordination, no long term plans, nothing, just chaos. Everybody just releases when he is in the mood for it. And since nothing is complete when released, devs further down the chain always go for the latest and greatest to get additional functionality. And to upgrade app1, you have to upgrade lib1 which triggers the updates of app2, app3, app4, lib3, etc. Sometimes you cant update a simple app without updating the whole desktop. The Linux dependency net appears nightmarish to everyone coming from Windows, where you have a reliable, stable base system which doesnt change for a decade and every app targets the same base system.
Linux, the kernel, is only running that great because it has a dictator. But Linus' dictatorship ends at the kernel borders, he has little influence outside. The Linux desktop also needs a dictator to massively slow down the rate of uncoordinated changes and force-stabilize the ecosystem. I hoped that Mark Shuttleworth could be that man, but he then introduced Unity... but even with unity, Ubuntu is the only chance for the Linux desktop for having a single defined set of libs attractive and influential enough for app devs as a primary target so they can safely go with the library versions in Ubuntu, instead of constantly chasing the latest and greatest versions from the upstream.