On Sun, 2005-10-30 at 10:45 +0100, Pascal Bleser wrote: <snip> > > If we transfer this kind of thinking to dependency issues, it would > > probably start solving itself in a short manner of time. > > Not really. Package dependencies are related to packaging. > It's none of the amarok developers' business if when installing my amarok > 1.3.5 RPMs, you get a > missing dependency on e.g. libmad.so.X
Maybe not the developers but certainly the packagers business. If the RPM is being put together for a specific distro, which in the case of suse they are, then it -is- the packagers business that missing programs are also provided in the repos they use thus reducing some of the dependency hell. If users what to go outside of suse repos, whether provided by suse or suse contributers, then they need to understand -they- (the users) are responsible for obtaining other required packages. I stopped using apt-rpm for this very reason, the packager put together an RPM (for some suse version) that required a newer version of some library and did not also provide that package. > > "You are missing package x. We can't find this package in your repos. > > But this package [package name X], found at www.example.org seems to be > > what you are missing. Should YAST download this package and install it > > for you? YES / NO > ... > That's a valid point. The only issue I see nowadays with not finding > dependencies is when you > install packages from a 3rd party repository that depends on another package > that's in another 3rd > party repository. > e.g. you install some package from my (suser-guru) repository that requires > another package from > packman, and you don't have the packman repository in your installation > sources Precisely why it is the packagers responsibility to provide all of the required packages. If it cannot be done legally then the package should not be provided at all. CYA > > That's really the only situation where we have to improve things. Everything > else is working really > fine, given you're using a capable package management frontend (such as > YaST2, y2pmsh, smart, yum, > apt-rpm, aptitude, yumex, ...). > > Actually the packman folks and I started discussing that idea with the SUSE > staff, to have YaST2 > fetch a list of available 3rd party repositories regularely and propose a > checklist to the user, so > she can easily add another repository. > That could also make it possible to say "you're trying to install xxx that > requires yyy. but yyy is > available from installation source (repository) zzz. do you want to add zzz > to your list of > installation sources ?" This would be absolutely fantastic. > > But actually that involves a number of issues, especially from the legal > point of view. > Packman and my repository include a number of packages that are .. well... > "touchy" for patent > licenses in some countries (mostly the USA), like mad, lame, mplayer, ... > AFAIK Novell's legal department is currently checking whether something like > that is feasible or not. > -- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989, linux since 1994, SuSE since 1998 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
