On 14/12/12 12:55, Russell Coker wrote:
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.
This is a problem that has been solved since Windows XP, i.e. the year 2001: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-by-side_assembly> Basically the same thing that Linux does: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_linker#ELF-based_Unix-like_systems> So either you last encountered the problem before 2001, or the people who wrote the software coded it to pre-2001/pre-WinSxS standards. Either way, that's way too long ago to continue holding a grudge. It would be wise to consider that a solved problem.