I think it's important to recognize that DLL Hell is not just a
technical problem. 
People treat it like a technical problem because the social assumption
is not
likely to ever change - You will never have the code for the VB runtime
DLLs,
and Microsoft does NOT care to change it just so some competitors
applications will
run better.

That's not the world we live in with Squeak. And though SqueakMap will
allow
people to develop packages more independently, since they don't have to
be 
accepted into the image, the point is not that everybody should now do
whatever
they want.

As a community, we need to solve the social problem, and COOPERATE. For
example,
SqueakMap broke compatibility, SMLoader needed to make a syncronized
release, so,
we just did.

Given cooperation and open source, the problems that remains are much
much smaller,
and the payoff from enabling coexistance of multiple versions in the
same live image
goes right down with it.

I think our problems are in helping us cooperate more strongly, and
letting more of us
help more easily (for example, by maintaining some application that's
currently in the 
image and therefore has to be integrated by SqC), and not in helping us
ignore one another
(which is obviously important in a commercial setting).

Daniel Vainsencher

Stephan Rudlof <sr at evolgo.de> wrote:
> Andreas Raab wrote:
> > Hi Dean,
> > 
> > Let me drop in a note here. Modules are no DLLs - they are not shared
> > runtime components. E.g., DLL-hell as we know it from Windows is due to
> > the fact that no developer can foresee what DLLs any customer may have
> > installed on his or her system at *runtime*. This is very different from
> > detecting and handling problems at *development* time.
> > 
> > Cheers,
> >   - Andreas
> 
> I think it depends on the point of view:
> 
> If you look at the Squeak VM coupled with an image as runtime environment
> running different apps, then parts of the image - modules - may be viewn as
> some kind of DLLs...
> 
> If you start multiple Squeaks each running just one app (composed from
> whatever versions of whatever modules), your argument holds; and then the
> DLL hell is only outside (for Windows)...
> 
> 
> Greetings,
> 
> Stephan
> 
> <...>
> 
> -- 
> Stephan Rudlof (sr at evolgo.de)
>    "Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis.
>     You can't simply say, 'Today I will be brilliant.'"
>     -- Kirk, "The Ultimate Computer", stardate 4731.3