[PLUG] Are dependences obsolete?

[Bynoe, RonaldX J]

I've often felt this way too, and some proprietary applications that I've used (games) are distributed with a lot bundled in. Obviously they'll still break over time as whatever they didn't bundle in changes too significantly, but when I would use Gentoo, I remember using prelinking (https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Prelink) as something of a solution to what you propose I think. It may not exactly fit the bill, but I know what you mean. I would gladly sacrifice 500 MB to ensure that an application could be run "stand-alone" on any Linux system from today 'till forever.

Pleasantly,
Ronald Bynoe

________________________________________
From: plug-bounces at lists.pdxlinux.org [plug-bounces at lists.pdxlinux.org] on behalf of Keith Lofstrom [keithl at gate.kl-ic.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 4:26 PM
To: PLUG
Subject: [PLUG] Are dependences obsolete?

The justification for dependencies in software packages is that
they can be shared, saving RAM and disk space.  But disks and
RAM is growing very large, while not much is actually shared.
Besides many instances of the same program sharing the runtime
code, do programs really need to share anything, beyond agreeing
on standard interfaces for the display manager and the operating
system?

Whenever I find myself in dependency hell while installing an
infrequently used program, I wish for a compile or install switch
that downloads every oddball library that the program requires,
and merges them all into one big binary blob that uses the simplest
possible interfaces with my existing OS.  It might chew up more
resources when it is running, but I would rather buy another
stick of RAM than upgrade a whole operating system, along with
the hundreds of little programs that I wrote for myself and would
rather not recompile.

But then, I suppose most people don't have a 40 year accumulation
of little programs;  ditching every app and starting over with
new versions may not be that painful for them.  They may not even
use that many apps.

Keith

--
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com
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