On Fri, 14 Dec 2012, Jeremy Visser <jeremy@visser.name> wrote:
Deployment is also modular -- "Dism" is a recent package management system for adding/removing Windows components. [0][1] And of course, Windows Installer can be fully automated/managed too. Used wisely, these two tools can be just as powerful as any Linux package manager.
Do they support dependencies and versioned dependencies? In past times when I've been forced to deal with Windows systems there were all sorts of nasty problems with ordering of installation. For example installing IE and installing MS-Office would both write some shared libraries so you had to make sure you installed them in the correct order. The correct solution to that problem is to have them both depend on a package that provides the library. Then there was the foolishness of shipping DLLs from MSVC with your application which needed to be renamed to avoid version conflicts with the same DLLs from a different version of MSVC installed by a different program. Having library version numbers in file names was too difficult for MS. Not that this has anything to do with the original issue of whether MS might use a Linux kernel.
Basically what I’m saying is that changing to a model with a minimal Linux/Unix base wouldn’t gain anything, because they already have a minimal modular system to that does everything that Microsoft needs it to.
Developing and maintaining a kernel is still a major task. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/