That ole Livna Problem/That ole VLC Problem

[Michael Schwendt]

On 16/01/2008, Les Mikesell wrote:
>
> And there could have been been a provision for
> namespaces in rpms and libraries so multiple versions of things could
> co-exist -

"namespaces in rpms" would not be enough. The OS environment would
need to support the same namespaces, too, or else there would still be
a run-time race between multiple minor versions of the same library.
Notice that several libraries and applications can even be built with
a different feature-set. Even multiple major releases of libraries
cannot coexist peacefully, if not all packagers take extra (sometimes
huge) efforts to avoid conflicts between data/doc/development files,
and e.g. package them as "libfoo2" and "libfoo3".

> but everyone wants to pretend that theirs is the only version
> that matters.

It's not that simple. There are many factors.