Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2974 mails)

["Steven T. Hatton" <hattons@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 27 February 2001 22:13, Hirendra Hindocha wrote:
> Hi all ,
>
> I've been seeing a lot of praise for Suse Linux on this list and I
> thought I'll present my dissenting opinion.
> I recently bought Suse Linux 7.0 Professional to install on our Dell
> system. I wanted to run IMP (Web based email) on this server to provide
> access to all of our employeess access to email (both web based and via
> imap). The installation itself was flawless (kudos to the team) but it
> is after that I ran into problems. I tried to install the IMP from rpms
> and ran into tons of unresolved dependencies. I then tried to download
> the source rpms and tried to install everything but that ran into
> problems too. I was basically looking for -
> Postfix + IMAP + Postgres + IMP . I didn't have any problems with the
> first 3 but the last one gave me ulcers. In frustration, I installed RH
> 7.0 and everything was up and running in no time.
>
> Suse is good with stability, installation and configuration but it is
> the lack of rpms that creates problems.
>
> BTW, if anyone can recommend a good Web-based email (like IMP) for SuSe,
> I'll be more than happy to revisit this distribution. For the moment , I
> use a combination of RH7.X, Suse 6.x (firewall) on our network.

Hiren,

I don't know the solution to your problem, but did you attempt to contact 
SuSE's support?  I don't even know if they give support for that kind of 
issue with the "installation" support.  I would hope they would.  As far as 
dependencies go.  I've seen a few instances where there is no way to get 
things installed without breaking dependencies.  That bothers me a lot.  I 
don't believe this is unique to SuSE.  I've been thinking about how nice a 
dependency graphing tool would be.  Something that could show all the 
dependencies associated with a given package and could be expanded to any 
depth.  Perhaps it would be useless, but I'd love to see an attempt to 
produce something such as this.

You raise a good issue.  I do like SuSE, and I think 7.1 is a very positive 
step in the right direction to get a better handle on all of these 
configuration issues.  The complexity involved in these systems is mind 
boggling.  I believe there is probably a good OO paradigm that could help 
alleviate some of these type of collisions which all of us hate.  I've been 
kicking around some ideas along these lines.  In my vision, each application 
would be treated as an object with public, private, and protected members.  
different components of the system would deal with configuration by passing 
messages to methods.

I've a lot to say on the issue, and hope to find some time to write this up 
in a formal way.  Right now I need sleep.

Steve