The concept of open source is a wonderful thing – and without it, the technological landscape in which we exist would be fundamentally different, and probably worse.
Not least because your favourite computer mag would have no reason to exist.
Its greatest feature is that if you’re building a software project, you don’t need to start completely from scratch. You don’t need to build your own stack from the ground up, and you don’t need to pay licensing fees for existing components and pass that cost on to your eventual users.
If you’re developing an app, for instance, you can say that it has dependencies – other pieces of open source software it needs to run. When the user installs your fancy toy on their home machine, they already have some of these dependencies present, and their package manager fetches the rest from the default repositories.
In many cases, this isn’t a problem. A single typed command and a password confirmation sees the fruits of your labour deployed successfully on tens of thousands of machines across the globe. Happiness and GitHub stars all round.
In real life, it doesn’t always work like that. Software is constantly being updated, and the dependencies on which your awesomely useful program relies change in functionality. Features are deprecated, and the way in which you interact with other features shifts. Read on to find out what you can do about it…
CREDIT: Magictorch
Dodging dependency hell
Containerisation can stop you drifting through these levels of hell.
Take Python – it’s one of the most popular programming languages in the world, and has T been used for millions of individual coding projects. The current version is 3.11, and while it comes with various upgrades for speed and security, it deprecates several features, functions and modules. If a Python app you wrote a few years ago uses binhex, distutils or gettext functions, it won’t run on the most up-to-date installs. While readers of Linux Format probably wouldn’t have too much of a problem specifying which Python version to use, it makes the experience more difficult than it needs to be. If you’re a developer, it means you either need to regularly go back and update your code so the app works with a broader variety of software setups, or abandon it and hope that somebody finds it useful enough to fork.
Python is an obvious example, but individual libraries can be a problem, too. If you’ve ever deployed software more than five years older than your distro release date, you’ll have run into dependency hell. Libraries and dependencies are obsolete, and you often find yourself in a labyrinth comprising dead ends, broken links, absent archives, forgotten files and, eventually, rage. In the event that you eventually find the exact version of glibstreamer you need, installing it may destroy the functionality of other apps on your system.
Historically, one way of ensuring thatbeta for Linux.