On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 4:35 PM, John Andersen
So tell me, Larry, would you really rather have tens to hundreds of thousands of individual library files to find and choose from when you're installing or developing software, or hundreds of packages, each containing dozens to hundreds of library files, most of which you probably don't need for a particular application? And may not need for any application you will use?
No. I'd rather not have to install support for hardware I can't use on a particular machine. Since I'm not a programming, I have no idea how those libraries work. I just don't understand why someone would program in a hardware dependency in a program in order to add a possible functionality to that program. In SaX's case, the i915 chipset support isn't a big deal, but when you are installing support for ISDN, 1394, SCSI, bluetooth, irda, etc, it gets to be a bit ridiculous. If your time management program supports your PDA, then it should be an option IF you have that pda. If I use a Windows CE based PDA, why do I need compatitbilty for a Palm or Blackberry? Yes, it's a minor issue, but it's an issue. Consider the problem in the beta/rc of 11.0 where there was a requirement for the thinkpad fingerprint scanner for networking. How many people even have that? 1 in 100,000? And how many Thinkpad users have it? None of my thinkpads have one, and I have about 8.
The question you pose suggest that the alternative to bogus dependencies is to get rid of packages all together. That is not at all true, and you know it.
I never said to get rid of the packages. I would just like to see more devs consider what people will actually use before forcing a dependency. What's the old saying - 80% of users only use 20% of the features. That's where a lot of the code bloat comes from. That's why I had to have 2GB for SuSE in 1999 where 98 could make do wuth 250-500MB. Not everyone has the newest and faster hardware. This Thinkpad X21 only supports 384MB RAM. The more ram I have to waste for unneeded services and stuff is taking away m ability to be productive. Now, I do taboo many programs like openoffice, beagle, compiz(on my slower machines), apparmour, etc. openSUSE's dependency resolution has come a long wa in the last few years. openoffice used to be an actual dependency at one point. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org