Yes...ish. There are a few crucial differences, though (I'm going to speak about apt-get and potential server-wide configurations based on Jigsaw, as I'll stick to what I know best).
First of all, apt-get, and jigsaw, are aware of versions. DLL hell mostly isn't. This means that if app A needs library X v1.0 and app B also needs library X v1.0, then only one is downloaded/used. If app B needs X v1.1 on the other hand, then two libraries will be used and downloaded. There's an ongoing and unsolved interop problem here (what if A and B want to share objects defined in library X? - this cannot be done unless both are dependent on the same version), but other than that, no problems. For jigsaw, you can _definitely_ ship your own modules with your own app. I'm not sure if jigsaw, after confirming the signature or whatnot, will just import these into the system library, but I doubt that's going to lead to any sort of 'hell'. apt-get is a little different. Its aware of versions, but usually only one version can be installed, and many dependencies aren't defined with version info at all. This originates from the linux mantra of backwards compatibility for their apps; there are very very few linux apps where in an older version you could do something that would result in fundamentally different things in a newer one. For apps that are known to require different versions, then usually the system maintainer (i.e. ubuntu or debian) builds separate targets for each major version (i.e. java5, not java), as well as a proxy package for the thing itself (just 'java' would proxy to any of the other ones, with java6 preferred). In practice this works fine, though the curators of the repository have to be quite careful. The Ubuntu and Debian curators definitely are, but a few other systems that run on top of apt-get can run into trouble. Then again, iPhone hackery (runs on apt-get too) was pretty straight forward and I never ran into big problems there. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
