I don't think it's unreasonable to have a system where every program uses the same version of a library.

>And just cross our fingers and just _hope_ that every app/library is fully amenable to being patched this way?

It requires some foresight in designing the application, and whether or not you even choose to use that application in the first place. We should strive to decrease the complexity of the system as a whole. The fact that packages are using different versions of the same library in the first place is a canary and the system should disincentivize that use case to some extent. Using static libraries or a chroot or a sandbox for everything is sweeping the problems under the carpet.

>taking an approach that requires us to “do extra work to untangle ourselves” we should try and…not have that problem in the first place.

I would prefer a system that allows you to link every application to the same library as a default, but also allows for some per-application override, perhaps by using symlinks. That would cover the majority of use cases. But I do not think that dynamic linking is generally in vain.

In my own projects, I try to rely on static linking as much as possible, so I understand your perspective as a developer. But as a user I do not want programs to have their own dependencies separate from the rest of the system.

> I don't think it's unreasonable to have a system where every program uses the same version of a library.

I really think it is. Even at the scale of a single app it may sometimes make sense to have multiple versions of a same library, if for instance it implements a given algorithm in two different ways and both ways have useful properties

Could a more streamlined “conception” of something like Gentoo fix this?

Applications ship their lock files + version constraints. Gets merged into a user/os level set of packages. You update one package, OS can figure out what it has to rebuild and goes off and does that.

Still shit-out-of-luck for anything proprietary, and it’s still super possible for users to end up looking at compile failures, but technically fits the bill?