Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2008 mails)
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Re: [opensuse] kde3 is gone... for 11.2 - removing avahi possible?
- From: "John E. Perry" <j.e.perry@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 15 Apr 2009 23:31:13 -0400
- Message-id: <49E6A681.5050402@xxxxxxx>
Carlos E. R. wrote:
Larry, I don't remember whether you were around for the discussion last
year concerning "stupid" dependencies, so I'll repeat my argument here,
for your and others' benefit.
Not being a linux programmer (but having written hundreds of other
programs of several kinds), I can't speak for them; however:
It's standard practice when developing a large program to use resources
from other programs and their dedicated libraries. Two good reasons for
this are that it reduces (often tremendously) the labor involved in
writing a large program, and that it makes development (often much) less
risky.
So avahi has a library that contains several functions that would help
me make my own program easier and better. I'm going to use it. That
means that avahi is now a dependency of my program. Avahi (I don't know
what avahi is, really, and for this argument, I don't care) is a large
program with a single large binary library that I can't easily get into,
even if I wanted to.
So (for example) the 20K of code that I wrote, with the 100K of avahi
code I linked to, just became a 4M program, much of the code likely
unused. But I feel it's worth it. I might never have finished it if
I'd had to do all that stuff myself. Now I have the benefit of a
successfully running program without too much work, and you have the
benefit of a solid program you can use for your purposes much sooner
than you would have otherwise (if ever). And it's much more robust
because I used proven techniques and code from avahi.
If you don't think that's worthwhile, write your own. Or thank the
freeware programmers and the suse people who both use dependencies
intelligently, and look for ways to improve the logistics of
dependencies, as Anders has been trying to explain. It's not as if
memory and disk space are hard to come by these days.
John Perry
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On Wednesday, 2009-04-15 at 15:06 -0400, Larry Stotler wrote:
On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 2:13 PM, Anders Johansson <ajohansson@xxxxxxx>
wrote:
It did. You even quoted it above. There was a complaint about illogical
dependencies on avahi, and it was fixed in 11.1
Must have missed that. Since 11.1 is not an option for me, I guess
I'm stuck with it. Honestly Anders, I've compained about stupid
dependencies in SuSE for as long as I can remember. My question is
who decides the dependencies? You guys who create the packages for
the distro, or the author of the program?
Surely you don't expect a complete remastering of 11.0
Nothing but bug fixes.
This change is complex and big, for a small benefit, it is not worth the
risk and hassle. Something else would break, so better leave it (for 11.0).
Larry, I don't remember whether you were around for the discussion last
year concerning "stupid" dependencies, so I'll repeat my argument here,
for your and others' benefit.
Not being a linux programmer (but having written hundreds of other
programs of several kinds), I can't speak for them; however:
It's standard practice when developing a large program to use resources
from other programs and their dedicated libraries. Two good reasons for
this are that it reduces (often tremendously) the labor involved in
writing a large program, and that it makes development (often much) less
risky.
So avahi has a library that contains several functions that would help
me make my own program easier and better. I'm going to use it. That
means that avahi is now a dependency of my program. Avahi (I don't know
what avahi is, really, and for this argument, I don't care) is a large
program with a single large binary library that I can't easily get into,
even if I wanted to.
So (for example) the 20K of code that I wrote, with the 100K of avahi
code I linked to, just became a 4M program, much of the code likely
unused. But I feel it's worth it. I might never have finished it if
I'd had to do all that stuff myself. Now I have the benefit of a
successfully running program without too much work, and you have the
benefit of a solid program you can use for your purposes much sooner
than you would have otherwise (if ever). And it's much more robust
because I used proven techniques and code from avahi.
If you don't think that's worthwhile, write your own. Or thank the
freeware programmers and the suse people who both use dependencies
intelligently, and look for ways to improve the logistics of
dependencies, as Anders has been trying to explain. It's not as if
memory and disk space are hard to come by these days.
John Perry
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For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@xxxxxxxxxxxx
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