By: Mark C (nospamplease.delete@this.nothere.net), September 20, 2022 8:15 am
Room: Moderated Discussions
Michael S (already5chosen.delete@this.yahoo.com) on September 20, 2022 2:05 am wrote:
> On this particular experimental installation it is acceptable, but I still wonder
> how can I install newer tools in a way that does not affect "system" at all.
>
Linux distributions generally regard software as part of the "system" making this a hard problem. A big part is shared libraries but tools like GCC take it farther depending on other whole programs as you mentioned with binutils.
There are efforts at making some packages coexist. I have seen Ubuntu installed with multiple GCCs easily switchable but can not rattle off how to do it.
The named solutions I see range from bundled shared libraries to containers to full blooded OS instances. As they get bigger they isolate more conflicting dependencies and place greater burdens on sharing with the base system.
It is all a huge mess, closely related to the nightmare which is distributing Linux binaries for different distributions and releases.
> On this particular experimental installation it is acceptable, but I still wonder
> how can I install newer tools in a way that does not affect "system" at all.
>
Linux distributions generally regard software as part of the "system" making this a hard problem. A big part is shared libraries but tools like GCC take it farther depending on other whole programs as you mentioned with binutils.
There are efforts at making some packages coexist. I have seen Ubuntu installed with multiple GCCs easily switchable but can not rattle off how to do it.
The named solutions I see range from bundled shared libraries to containers to full blooded OS instances. As they get bigger they isolate more conflicting dependencies and place greater burdens on sharing with the base system.
It is all a huge mess, closely related to the nightmare which is distributing Linux binaries for different distributions and releases.
