People in the windows world say "DLL Hell", and I hear Free Software people call it "dependency hell" or somesuch for things like dealing with Ruby Gems, or other dependency-installation nightmares.
However, I think hell is the wrong term, becuase usually you get out of it. I think the right name for it is "dependency purgatory"
enyst, Scorpio20, Christopher M. Hobbs (inactive), Olivier Mehani and 6 others likes this.
Show all 5 replies
I see what you're saying, but you only get out temporarily. Eventually it happens again. I think "dependency hell" may be more of a "dependency Groundhog Day", but just the bad parts where you are going a little crazy punching people and playing chicken with trains. This metaphor... needs work.
In defence of Ruby, each gem has a file called a gemspec which contains a human-readable reference to each gem the current gem is dependent upon. Dependency gems are automatically installed by the installer if they are missing or are a version which is less than that specified in the gemspec.
If you want to deploy gems in an enterprise solution it is recommended you use Bundler.
If you want to deploy gems in an enterprise solution it is recommended you use Bundler.
and, asides, the two problems are significantly different. The "DLL hell" is usually due to library embedding, which is common place on Win*, as well as in Gems, Eggs, etc. On the other hand, the "dependency hell" is not due to library embedding, which distros fight as much as they can, but rather to deficiencies in solver capabilities. For a Debian solution to that, see http://packages.debian.org/unstable/apt-cudf
Haven't seen much of either hell since Windows programs started shipping all their dependencies in the folder of the dependant software and since RPM distributions other than Fedora, RHEL and OpenSUSE pretty much went extinct.
The main dependency hell on Linux was because people found random RPMs online that may or may not have matched the library names in their distro.
I don't find that gems and similar things provide much of a hell. When it happens though, or happened, the purgatory analogy is spot on.
The main dependency hell on Linux was because people found random RPMs online that may or may not have matched the library names in their distro.
I don't find that gems and similar things provide much of a hell. When it happens though, or happened, the purgatory analogy is spot on.