DLL Hell comes to the Mac
- From: Tommy Troll <tom_elam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2007 18:10:48 -0800 (PST)
Shades of Windows 95!
From MacFixIt.com
"Users of Adobe applications can be in for their own peculiar brand of
headache after upgrading to a new system, such as Leopard. The chief
problem here is that, even though applications on Mac OS X are now
bundles and we've all got quite a lot of hard disk space, so that each
application can very easily hold all the resources it needs within
itself, nevertheless, even what should be a relatively small and
simple application, such as Adobe Photoshop Elements, so far from
being self-contained, insists on installing bits and pieces all over
your computer. The likelihood of something going wrong with one of
these bits and pieces during the system upgrade process is very high -
something won't get migrated into place, or it will have the wrong
permissions, or whatever - and then when you try to start up your
Adobe application, it balks, without any clear explanation of what the
problem is. Plus, Adobe doesn't use the standard Mac installers, so
getting an idea of what is supposed to be installed where is pretty
much a hopeless task.
To give advice that covers every situation would be impossible, but
the most productive approach seems to be to expect to have to
reinstall from scratch, using Adobe's installer for whatever
application this is. When you do, you're going to need the ability to
write into all kinds of weird places, so make sure you're logged in as
an admin user at the time you perform the installation. Even then
we've heard stories of the installer complaining about some permission
or other, so you might even have to log out and log back in as root in
order to get the installation to complete. (Naturally, you should
disable the root user afterwards, for security reasons.) Oh, and then
there's the problem where the installer refuses to run because the
application is already installed; not only do Adobe installers refuse
to overwrite and correct the existing installation, they won't run if
they find traces of the application anywhere on your hard drive. So,
for instance, moving the application aside (e.g. to the Desktop) is
not enough; the installer will notice it and will refuse to operate.
You may have to find all the bits and pieces of the application and
throw them in the trash and empty the trash, before the installer will
consent to operate. But of course you don't know where all the bits
and pieces are; that's why you're trying to reinstall. Catch-22."
What is described above is exactly what happened when programs
installed in Windows 95. Files got written all over the place. It
created nightmares for even minor changes in Windows DLLs. Welcome to
1995, you poor Mac sufferers.
.
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