-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Kai Ponte wrote:
On Tuesday 02 January 2007 05:58, Janne Karhunen wrote:
On Monday 01 January 2007 21:55, Mark Goldstein wrote:
I've installed smart (smart-0.49.1-40.guru.suse102) and almost immediately bumped into the following situation: it indicates that there is upgrade for amarok but fails to perform upgrade: I have been wondering if package managers as we know them today can never be proper solution to software installation. If people are to use it, it needs to be better and easier than 'setup.exe'.
Is it really possible to perfectly hide overly complex package dependencies with complex tools around it? It doesn't seem that way yet. Package managers have been 'almost there' for a decade now.
IMO, don't use dependencies.
If you're program/application requires a dependency, then provide it in the package. You can easily write an installation routine to check if the required libraries are present and then install them in a sub-folder of your application if they're not.
Now that's a very bad idea ;) One of the advantages of separating libraries etc... and having dependencies is also security. Imagine you bundle each dependency in each package (or installer, etc..., you don't need packages if you don't have to manage dependencies) and that you have, say, libpng.so.3 bundled in 500-600 bundles. Now there's a security issue with libpng and it has to be fixed. With the current system, you get a patched libpng.so.3 and you're done, the security issue is fixed in every application that uses libpng. But what about your bundled applications ? You'd have to update 500-600 of those. We should never corrupt Linux down to an insecure, messy and unstable system like Windows just because some people don't like those package systems with dependencies.
I'm still not quite sure where SUSE stores programs - it seems some are in /etc/bin, others in /usr/bin and still others in /opt/kde3/bin.
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html
http://www.novell.com/documentation/opensuse102/opensuse102_startup/data/sec...
cheers
- --
-o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/
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