On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 12:55 PM, Wolfgang Rosenauer <wolfgang@rosenauer.org> wrote:
Archie Cobbs schrieb:
A simple example: I have an old SLES9 machine. It still works great and I use it every day. However, when I tried upgrading my Firefox 2.x to 3.x, it quickly became impossible and I gave up (there is no pre-built Firefox 3.x for SLES9 in OBS). I don't want to have to download the Firefox source and build it manually. Of course, you can forget trying to upgrade SLES9 to SUSE 11.x and have everything continue to work (why should I be forced to do that anyway?). So this is "the problem".
A little bit offtopic to the main but for your example. There is a reason there is no Firefox 3 for SLES9. It's simply not possible to build it since Gtk+ on SLES9 is so old that Firefox 3 refuses to build (and run). Nix (whatever this is) wouldn't help you in that case I guess.
Yes it would. You'd simply build and install the newer Gtk+, and then Firefox. Nix allows multiple versions of Gtk+ (or anything else) to exist at the same time, so installing the new Gtk+ doesn't mean uninstalling the old one. I'm not arguing that we should all fall in love with Nix, but rather that it does solve at least one problem that is currently unsolved, and therefore (in the academic spirit) it's worth thinking about what it means, etc. -Archie -- Archie L. Cobbs -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+help@opensuse.org