Under a Gibbous Moon

I have used Linux, in various distributions (Mandrake, Lindos, Red Hat, DSL, SuSe, Ubuntu), over the years and one thing has remained the same. Windows might have DLL hell but Linux has dependency hell.

Dependency hell? This occurs when you need to make sure that you have all the possible libraries needed to run (or just compile) a particular program. Of course, those dependencies require their own dependencies which in turn have their own dependencies until it spirals completely out of control and you end up with something that looks like the organizational chart for a multinational conglomerate.

Of course, that is only if it is simple. Some programs might require different versions of the same library. The won’t be backward compatible with the version you have or the program will make use of something that has been removed from the newer versions of the library. This ends up requiring that you have multiple copies of the same library on hand just to run specific programs.

This is, of course, the natural result of open source. It allows anyone to do anything without consulting anyone else. Don’t get me wrong, open source has done some great things, but since there is no central authority, there is a great deal of unnecessary chaos and complexity.

My favorite example is the popular FUPPES (Free UPnP Entertainment Server). It is a great program. It is for serving up the media on your computer so that it can be used by other devices on the network (in my case to the XBOX360 and then to the TV).

FUPPES is only available as a source download, which means that you have to compile it yourself. Go on, do a search for it. You will receive a mountain of forum threads dealing with the trials and tribulations of compiling FUPPES. I personally have done it three different times and each time it has been a joy and a pleasure akin to attending a heavy metal concert while hung over.

Oddly enough, if you want the Windows version of FUPPES, it has an executable file. When people want to install a program, they just want to click on it and just have it install. They don’t want to spend three hours coaxing it to life. Windows doesn’t make you do that. Mac doesn’t make you do that.

“Oh sure,” people will say, “just use the application installer that comes with your distro.” True, but then you are confined to the programs and versions that your distro selects.

For example, when Firefox 3.5 came out I waited for it to show up in the package manager. It didn’t. I poked around and found out that Ubuntu was not going to add it to the repository until the next release. But I want it now! So I had to go around the system. Luckily, Mozilla puts there programs into self-contained (i.e. no dangling dependencies) packages for relatively simple install. As FUPPES demonstrates, this is not always the case.

There have been many programs that I have wanted to try but simply gave up on because compiling them became more effort than it was worth. I regularly read articles that say Linux is ready for mainstream but until they can get some consistency and simpler application management, your average computer user is simply not going to put up with this crap.

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