
Package Management Sudoku - JoshTriplett
http://algebraicthunk.net/~dburrows/blog/entry/package-management-sudoku/
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digi_owl
I maintain the notion that the basic problem of most package managers are that
they can't handle having multiple lib versions installed under a common name.

So if you want say multiple versions of Qt installed, you need to have a
packaged named Qt4 and one named Qt5 to avoid a severe clash of dependencies.

The "mainstream" solution to this has become containers.

But the funny thing is that on the lib level, the problem basically don't
exist. This because linker (ld) can separate the libs at file level via SONAME
structures.

I have for some years successfully used a distro that makes use of this,
called Gobolinux. And you also have NixOS and Guix doing very similar things.

Here is the kicker, Gobolinux is built using mostly shell script.

~~~
hobarrera
I honestly don't get what you want. You can install qt4 and qt5 as separate
packages. This is actually how several distributions resolve this.

Why is it an issue that they're not both called "qt"? Why would you actually
want to different things with the same name.

~~~
digi_owl
Universal dependencies.

A large complaints when it comes to distros is that dependencies do not
translate across.

This in large part because of this workaround by including partial version
numbers in package names, as none of the major distros do it the same way.

But rather than fix it in the minimal fashion, they instead use it as an
excuse to foist containerization onto the desktop.

