Re: DLL Hell comes to the Mac

"Tommy Troll" <tom_elam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:47624fb5-6097-4c97-bab9-cd8ca6b24992@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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.

[snip]
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.

Sadly, this is the problem with ports- they never 'fit in' in the target platform, because they always bring design presupposition from their source. What Adobe is doing is perfectly normal on Windows, and works great- because there's extensive support for installation in this form.

Ports in the opposite direction have these problems too- Windows has no notion of bundles, so any program that tries to use them comes out rather strangely. But this is much more rare; ports usually go to the minority platform, not from it.

[snip]
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.

This is, however, a misunderstanding. Even if my I put my own .DLL in \Windows\System32, that doesn't mean I will be affected when MS upgrades Windows' DLLs. I must try to *replace* an actual file that is part of Windows for that to happen.

The Windows 95 problem (in this respect) was that it had no standard installer; it had APIs for you to use when you wrote your own installer. But if you wanted your installer to install an upgraded Windows component (say, DirectX or MDAC), your choices were few and ugly. And if you did it wrong you could really *** things up.

Windows has since added a standard installer, and OS X has always had one, even if it isn't very good.


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