They keep trying to fix an NP-complete program with a hack. Alas, it's a popular hack, and when the perpetrators are told it won't work, they go "nah, nah, can't hear you". TL:DR? Do it with shared libraries as Hugh suggests, or die in agony (:-)) I have a whole series on this: I used to work in/Binary Stability/ at Sun, where David J. Brown (which see!) solved it in Solaris. The original Go paper was Russ Cox's https://research.swtch.com/version-sat He proposed using a "sat solver" to find particular combinations that would work... or timeout and say "can't find one". Sun used a sat solver to make sure we hadn't screwed up the general case In rough order, I wrote * https://leaflessca.wordpress.com/2017/02/12/dll-hell-and-avoiding-an-np-comp... * https://leaflessca.wordpress.com/2018/10/28/how-about-a-stable-kernel-api/ * https://leaflessca.wordpress.com/2018/09/03/avoiding-an-np-complete-problem-... The last one was an "experience report" submitted to the Go team. --dave On 4/26/25 11:49, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
I don't like flatpak: if there is a shared library bug, it can be fixed once on a normal Linux distro. With flatpaks, each one that uses the library must be update. But will they?
Furthermore, there is a lot less sharing of disk space and RAM.
$ flatpak list --columns=name [1mName[22m Element Bluefish Fedora KDE 6 Platform Fedora Platform default fedoraproject platform translations Freedesktop Platform Freedesktop Platform Mesa Mesa (Extra) Mesa Mesa Mesa (Extra) Mesa (Extra) FFmpeg extension with extra codecs openh264 openh264 openh264 GNU Image Manipulation Program Déjà Dup Backups GNOME Application Platform version 46 KolourPaint Paint Telegram Telegram Desktop Webview Add-on
I don't know why there are so many versions of a particular package installed. For example, here's more info about Mesa (ignoring Mesa (Extra)):
Mesa …esktop.Platform.GL.default 25.0.3 23.08 flathub system Mesa …esktop.Platform.GL.default 25.0.3 24.08 flathub system Mesa …esktop.Platform.GL.default 25.0.3 24.08 flathub user
There are two "branches"s: 23.08 and 24.08 and yet the versions are all 25.0.3. And why would one have "installation" "user" and the other two "system"?
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