Everybody seems to be expressing their opinions this week about what Linux needs to become more successful in the OS market. I’ve already shared with you what Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at eWeek thinks. Now let’s hear from Arvind Narayanan at NewsForge.

” The package installation problem is one of the primary barriers to desktop Linux adoption. Most if not all solutions so far have addressed the wrong problem (at least for desktop users) — resolving dependencies at package installation time. A much better approach is to ensure that as few dependencies exist as possible. While this might seem a lofty goal, given the open source development emphasis on reusing as much code as possible, I believe this goal is indeed achievable through a process of desktop component standardization. The dependency problem is well analyzed and well understood. Therefore, I will restrict myself to a quick overview. Software packages have dependencies on other packages, which makes the user’s task of installation more difficult. The problem is much worse for binary than for source packages: Even library versions differing by a minor version are frequently not binary compatible. While compiling from source, it is possible to detect if a library exists and compile accordingly, but this is not possible with binaries.
The open source culture of reusing code also contributes to the severity of the problem. Reuse has the desirable properties of reducing development effort and improving security, but increases dependency between packages. This is one reason why the dependency problem is more severe on the Linux desktop than with other OSes, the other reason being a lack of centralized control. Current solutions center around packaging formats like rpm and deb, which are useful for encapsulating package metadata, and package repositories which are built on top of these package formats. Repositories offer many advantages, including quality assurance and ease of automation, and as such are an excellent solution for the server. For the desktop, however, the repository approach has several shortcomings, and it is unclear if it solves anything at all. (We are looking at a “grandma” or “Aunt Tillie” user.) Firstly, for the majority of computer users who are on dialup, initiating a repository installation and waiting for an indefinitely long time is simply not an option. It also leaves less control in the hands of the app authors, who are at the mercy of the different repository maintainers to do their packaging for them. In practice, only the most popular software gets packaged. And another problem is that once the user starts mixing packages installed using the packaging system and without, they start down a slippery slope toward system chaos.”.