"Bj�rn Persson" <bjorn@xn--rombobjrn-67a.se> wrote in message 
news:20130228010057.13659976@hactar.xn--rombobjrn-67a.se...
Randy Brukardt wrote:
...
>As for operations, there is of course no way to guarantee that the
>library actually works as documented - not even if you write it
>yourself. :-)

That's not quite true: that's what SPARK is for, and to a lesser extent 
tools like Codepeer. Not being able to use them is one of the disadvantages 
of "linking" rather than using Ada source code: interfacing to non-Ada code 
is inherently unsafe.

I know I'm "bad" in this aspect: I don't trust much code (even some that I 
wrote myself), especially if it is not in Ada and do so only out of 
necessity (I don't have time to write display drivers or a network stack --  
but I much preferred programming on MS-DOS, which did virtually nothing for 
you, to the current systems with tons of cruft that often doesn't work as 
advertised.)

>> And you've also greatly complicated your installation and
>> updating requirements.
>
>I suppose that's true in Windows. In Fedora, "yum install niftyprogram"
>downloads and installs Nifty Program and all the libraries it needs.
>"yum update" updates all installed packages to the latest version. Not
>complicated at all. Other distributions have similar commands, and
>there are also GUI tools for those who want that.

The outrageous amount of time wasted creating and maintaining installers of 
any sort (including "package managers") is precisely what I hate about 
virtually all systems. (And don't claim it's somehow easier on Linux -- I 
read the messages here all the time about packaging screw-ups. And when I 
tried to install a supposed update to Perl on my new Debian system the other 
day (something I don't even use and am not quite sure why it's on my 
system), the package manager announced that it needed to remove 451 other 
packages, including GNOME and packages that claimed to be the Linux kernel. 
I quickly canceled *that* update and haven't tried since.

Moral: the best dependence is *no* dependence. It's not always practical to 
do that, but the less dependence you have the better.

                                               Randy.