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Revision as of 19:18, 25 June 2002 by 136.186.1.114 (talk) (mention the non-windows situation.)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)DLL-hell is a describing term for troublesome situations caused by operating systems that do not monitor the installed Dynamic link library files delivered with installed applications, eventually causing a chaos of thousands of mysterious DLL-files, some of which are necessary for the system to function normally, while others are just wasting space. Common phenomenon in some Windows systems.
It is less of an issue with other operating systems that support dynamic linking, as they support the concurrent installation of multiple versions of the same library and can link applications to the appropriate version. However, it can still occur if a new version of a library that is supposedly compatible with an older version is not in some way (for instance, if it contains a bug not present in the older version).