John E. Perry pecked at the keyboard and wrote:
Carlos E. R. wrote:
On Wednesday, 2009-04-15 at 15:06 -0400, Larry Stotler 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
On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 2:13 PM, Anders Johansson
wrote: 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.
The one flaw to this approach is when the programmer links into a library that is thought to be stable but is buggy. Then people are forced to install the buggy software which causes problems. There are good programmers that know the difference and poor/lazy programmers that don't care. -- Ken Schneider SuSe since Version 5.2, June 1998 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org