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-complete-problem/
• 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-by-recycling-multics-answer/

--dave

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
    Name
    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"?

---
Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org
Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk

-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
davecb@spamcop.net           |              -- Mark Twain