On Wed, 18 Jul 2001, Nikhil Joshi wrote:
Linux is so well organized in other ways then why this irrational dependency thing . Why can't developers make standalone software ?
I think this was discussed on LWN or Slashdot a while back ("Shared dependencies hell") with respect to GnuCash. Making standalone software would probably mean using bloated statically linked executables. That's generally not a good thing (e.g compare the size of the statically linked version of Opera 5.0 with the dynamically linked one).
I have also found that you can sometimes get away with using lower version dependencies than those actually specified if you compile the source yourself, though you may need to do a bit of tweaking. Binary packages seem to be built on bleeding edge systems and thus the need for the latest versions of the dependencies. No real solution here. The Linux development model demands that you release early and release often.
-YoGeSh