> What happened to elegance, efficiency, and modular, maintainable design?
Each app having it's own copy of the libraries it needs is actually MORE maintainable.
It's not uncommon for a newer version of a library to introduce a change which breaks something in your app. One example from my work: we tried building with a newer version of Qt and all our text was suddenly getting rendered upside-down due to changes in how Qt uses OpenGL. If we had been using the system copy of Qt, it would have been our customers seeing this problem instead of our dev team.
There are other advantages too, but to my mind this alone is enough reason to bundle libraries with your app.
But is that the common case? Or is the common case that, on occasion every now and then an incompatible change is introduced, but much much more often bugs and security issues are fixed that your users will benefit from immediately, and not have to wait for you to release a new version with new bundled libraries.
I'm a bit surprised that the Qt guys would make an incompatible change during a stable series. Is it possible you were relying on undocumented behavior that was subject to change?
Each app having it's own copy of the libraries it needs is actually MORE maintainable.
It's not uncommon for a newer version of a library to introduce a change which breaks something in your app. One example from my work: we tried building with a newer version of Qt and all our text was suddenly getting rendered upside-down due to changes in how Qt uses OpenGL. If we had been using the system copy of Qt, it would have been our customers seeing this problem instead of our dev team.
There are other advantages too, but to my mind this alone is enough reason to bundle libraries with your app.