Re: OFT say you have our attention on M$

"Beck" <beck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

[...]

> How easy would it be to improve the dependency check on an install
> to say... if libstdc++5 is not installed then install it. If it is
> installed, do not install unless the previous version pre-dates the
> install version?

That wouldn't be an improvement. APT can do things much more subtle
than that. The problem is that it's not always safe to install a
later version of something. Generally it is, but sometimes things
change incompatibly.

There's a really strong culture against not breaking compatibility in
the Windows world, largely because there's no mechanism of handling it
safely. Or maybe because everyone relied on it being safe to upgrade
things, so everyone forever more are required to make it so.

Anyway, that's not so in GNU/Linux. It's still not common to break
backwards compatibility, but it happens. So sometimes (not often, but
often enough for it to be an issue), a later version of a library will
remove a function, or change it incompatibly. And the ability to do
that is a feature, not a bug: sometimes a function's unsafe, and needs
to be removed.

So GNU/Linux package managers (such as APT) have the ability to handle
such conflicts (so long as they're told about them). So it may be
safe to install a later version of libstdc++5, but it'll require
upgrading foobar, baz, and removing zork (because there's no version
of zork compatible with the new version of libstdc++5), and a package
manager can tell you so you can choose what to do.

[...]
.

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