Multiple versions of a lib on Linux

Question

So i often have the problem that i work on applications that need different versions of the same library. I can usually not have two versions of the same library installed but i can link to specific local versions. However if these libraries again depend on differnt version of something else i'm quickly getting into "dependency hell". I understand (i think) the benefits of sharing libraries but frankly i would prefer if every program/lib would come with everything it needs. Is there any linux distro out there that tried something like this ? would it be possible ?

Thanks!

Answer 1

There is a website for sta.li, a linux distro where everything is statically linked. But it does not have much documentation and only a 23MB tarball, so I highly doubt it's anything near usable.

Some applications offer statically linked versions, though. Ubuntu package search

Answer 2

The dependancy probelm mainly occurs when you are compiling one pacakge manually or installing a single deb or rpm package that you downloaded. It will be a good idea to use the package manager provided in your distro to install the packages. In ubuntu you can use the apt-get or in redhat based distro you can use yum package managers. You need to add the 3rd party repositories like http://rpmfusion.org/ , if the package that you are looking for is not in the distro default repository.