ceteris non paribus

Things that have landed me in dependency hell during the last 30 days when I tried to install them:

• calibre on Ubuntu 8.10 and CentOS 5.3
• DBD::mysql on RHEL5
• graphite on RHEL5
• php-mysql with wildly disparate versions of mysql and php

I was ok about it all, really, until I read this:

Decoupling Server Development from the OS

…and now that I’ve become convinced that this doesn’t really need to be the state of things, I end up in a table-pounding rage each time I see something like:

/usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/lib/libssl.so when searching for -lssl

or

symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libgio-2.0.so.0: undefined symbol: g_thread_gettime