On Tue, 2002-03-05 at 18:22, Ben Reser wrote: > On Tue, Mar 05, 2002 at 05:52:26PM -0600, Bryan Paxton wrote: > > However, this does bring up in an interesting point. You say Mandrake > > packages are not "supposed" to be backward compatible with older > > versions of the distro. At a glance, that sounds harmless and logical > > (I'm sure there are reasons for this). > > But isn't this the exact same reason, or one of them anyway, why we fled > > from the world of Windows to begin with? > > e.g., MS Office backward compatibility > > He probably should have said aren't necessarily backwards compatible. > Sometimes they use newer libraries. Names of required packages change > (e.g. the new lib name scheme) and other changes in the distribution > make the RPMS incompatible.
Yes yes, but I think more thought needs to be put in changing the lib name scheme each time a new version is pumped out. For example, if you go to rpmfind.net and do a search on libpanel-applet, you will pull up two that carry that package. The first and obvious being mandrake, the second being Ximian (name is Helix on the page however). So it appears Ximian has already begun work on supporting 8.2 (hopefully shortly after 8.2 freeze, ximian will have an announcement). Now, why is ximian using this scheme? To simply support 8.2 (speculating, I'll probably go talk with some ximian folks tonight). Yet, if you query for gnome-core-devel you will see just about every single distribution packages these libraries under this name, including Red Hat (which in the past it has been mdk routine to stay compatible with them). So you see all these conflicts between virtual packages and so forth. This is very frustrating for the end-user, as well as the power user. For too long this has been a problem in the Linux community, I call it mini-forking. It's use is self-orientated, to make, maintain, and distribute packages to your users, keeping flexibility and ease with your development and it's respective cycles. However, at the same time, each distro is doing this (more or less), digging that compatibility hole a little further. I think some time in the near future organization of such is going to be needed. In the same way the LSB covers the _base_ of a system, there should probably be a unified scheme for GNOME, as well as kde, and other high user-land environments and software. (sorry, I got off on a rant : P This is out-of-scope :) ) > > However, I'd argue the reasons many of us fled Windows is preciously the > opposite. Microsoft has held onto DOS/Win3.1 compatiblity at the cost > of stability forever. Things have to progress and sometimes the only > way to do that is to make things incompatible. I'd argue that it wasn't compatibility they kept for the sake of stability (stability and MS don't belong in the same sentence period IMHO : p), I'd say it was for the sake of re-using code. Less cost, less development, faster product out the door, but poor software == more tech support == $$ ? : ) Anyway... MS is renown for it's internal compatibility "problems", it's a brilliant (though not positive) marketing scheme. > > However, I routinely borrow cooker packages and compile them under older > Mandrake distributions. Just yesterday I took the cooker everybuddy > package and rebuilt it under 7.2. > : ) As do I and several others :) However, this is all out of the scope of the original email, but does make for interesting conversation : ) -- Bryan Paxton Public PGP key: http://www.deadhorse.net/bpaxton.gpg "Heedfulness: the path to the Deathless. Heedlessness: the path to death. The heedful do not die. The heedless are as if already dead." -- Dhp. 21-24
