-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At some point hitherto, [EMAIL PROTECTED] hath spake thusly: > On Wed, 3 Jul 2002, at 12:20pm, Derek D. Martin wrote: > > Missing from both right now, I think, is the ability to say that a > > particular package is recommended, but not required (does dpkg do this?) > > Debian's system does do this. A package can be "Required", "Recommended", > or "Suggested". It is very nice in this regard.
Well, then chalk another one up for dpkg. :) > > > IOW if I want gnome but don't have a sound card, then esound isn't going > > to do me a damn bit of good... > > The problem here is that, because GNOME is a big, interconnected > environment, any GNOME application (e.g., gnome-terminal) ends up being > linked to the libesd library. Hmmm... It seems to me we could get around this sort of problem with a loadable module approach... loading subsystems only when they are needed and available. Obviously, it would take some work to make the necessary changes to the gnome infrastructure, and all of the applications that use it... > The best solution available is to install the esound package and disable > the sound daemon itself. At the moment, from a practical standpoint, yes; but I like my idea better. :) > > This is a quite impressive feat, and Red Hat would do well to copy it. > > I actually think Red Hat would do very poorly to copy it. In practice I agree; and I more or less said what you said, only much more succinctly (limited resources, and sticking to release schedules)... But in principle, it would be very cool if it could be done. This is where the strenght of apt-get lies, regardless of how unworkable and unscalable maintaining it all really is... > > The problem is worse when you consider all the other vendors who use > > RPM... often RPMs for one system won't work on another (though often they > > will). > > That is not a problem with package managers. I wasn't trying to suggest that it was... But I *do* think it's a problem that is worthy of attention by the Linux vendors. And apparently, so do they (at least some of them)... > > Packages built for distros that use it as their core will work on all of > > the other distros that use it too... > > Unless there is only going to be one release of UnitedLinux, and they are > never going to ever release any updates, that will not be true. It will be no more or less true than it is for other currently commercially available operating systems. If you want to run software that's based on release Y, and you have release X (where X < Y) then you need to upgrade. We already have this problem with Linux systems, only it's magnified substantially by all the different distributions that software vendors must either try to support, or choose to ignore. Having a unified core at least reduces the problem to the same level as enjoyed by all the other OS vendors... > What *would* help, and is not done nearly enough, is if software designers > and package maintainers put more effort into making sure different versions > of their libraries could co-exist on the same system. Agreed. > Don't get me wrong, I think things like the LSB and UnitedLinux are a good > idea, but they are not a panacea. Agreed. But then, to solve this problem, there is no panacaea. Ultimately, there is no complete, pefect solution. Microsoft tried to solve it by maintaining backward compatibility. Look where that got them... - -- Derek Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] - --------------------------------------------- I prefer mail encrypted with PGP/GPG! GnuPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D Retrieve my public key at http://pgp.mit.edu Learn more about it at http://www.gnupg.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE9I1S0djdlQoHP510RAjhvAJ4hQz8qbbaonAU7zg4qjUOjquQqUACfUAWb NLcdOSpnrktCiZtEOP8Al+Q= =Z6t+ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
