Not as long as people follow the rules. An installer should never delete a generic support file like msvcr71.dll once installed. An installer that does so is just as broken as a Linux installer that deletes libxml2.so when it uninstalled itself, and causes just as much damage. In other words, it's not the operating system's fault.
This perception of a continued "DLL hell" is exactly the reason why Microsoft has foisted the baroquely complicated and entirely unnecessary "side-by-side" concept upon us. They apparently believe that the developers of the world are too "stoopid" to follow the rules, when in fact the great majority of developers knew out how to solve this problem a decade ago.
ยทยทยท
On Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:24:28 -0700, Paul McNett <p@ulmcnett.com> wrote:
Mike Driscoll wrote:
> I thought msvcr71.dll should be on everything too, but it wasn't on one > of my first test user's XP boxes and it took me forever to figure out > that that was the issue. I think installing one of the service packs or > hotfixes might delete the file. I know we had a problem for a while when > we were doing our standard install of various programs and one of them > would delete a file that the next one needed. So we had to change the > order of the installation or something. The specifics escape me at the > moment.
The specifics are: Windows is still mired in DLL hell.
--
Tim Roberts, timr@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.