DLL hell as a job description

I've had a hard time explaining my views on package distribution. Let me try and wrap it up this way: DLL hell is a job description. Dealing with it is a work that has to be done, one large enough to consume full-time work. When DLL hell is really problematic is when that work falls on end users who aren't even software experts.

Break that down. First of all, I don't see how the root problem can be avoided. Large software is built modularly. The software is broken into components that are maintained and advanced by independent teams. No matter how hard they try, and no matter what advanced component system they use, those teams will always introduce unexpected incompatibilities between different versions of different components. I am highly sympathetic to WCOP's goal of controlling external dependencies, though I see it as a goal that can only be partially fulfilled.

Second, there is a role to play in finding versions of components that are compatible with each other. My favorite approach is that taken by Linux distributions, where within one distribution there is only one version of each component. Less centralized approaches are also plausible, but they have severe difficulties. An example would be Eclipse Plugins. However, in that example, it mostly appears to work well only when the functionality added is minor and the plugins being added don't interact with each other very much.

With all of that foundation, the DLL hell of Microsoft Windows is much easier to talk about: End users are playing the same role as those making a Linux distribution. Even computer specialists will resent this undesired work, and most users of Windows are not computer specialists. The only good way I see to fix this is to shift the distribution-making work onto some other group. That's challenging with Windows software being sold per copy, but perhaps it can be made to work with enough red tape. Alternatively, perhaps Windows could move over to a subscription model where the application bits can be freely copied. If the bits could be freely copied, then Windows distributions could sprout just as easily as Linux distributions have.