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by planb
973 days ago
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> If the Firefox browser engine was provided as an iOS library by Mozilla then Mozilla would update the library and every app that uses it would get the update at once. That problem is only caused by this not being supported. We don't want to go back to DLL hell, do we? History has shown that this approach does not scale, and definitely not on mobile. |
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Meanwhile you still don't need a thousand versions installed because the library only has to declare a version compatibility change if some part of the API is removed. Otherwise a newer version of the library will implement everything an older version does and only make additions or bug fixes.
Then you have some app which needs library version 2.3.4 or higher, some other app needs the same library with version 2.3.5 or higher, so the system sees those dependencies and installs version 2.3.9 which is backwards compatible and can be used by both of those apps. An old app needs version 1.2.0 or higher, which isn't compatible with 2.3.9, so the system installs version 1.2.15, which is. Then you have two versions of the library installed alongside each other instead of the three versions you have now -- and the two versions you have installed are both still maintained, instead of having apps that quietly statically include versions 1.2.0 and 2.3.4 which each have a big fat CVE, and 2.3.5 which patched the security vulnerability but still has a couple of inconvenient bugs you don't need.
This is all done by a package manager which uses the list of dependencies for each app to take care of it for you when you install an app. This has been a solved problem for decades. But mobile fails to implement the known solution and instead sticks you with inefficient manual updating of every individual app.