On Fri, 13 Dec 2002, Rafael 'Dido' Sevilla wrote: > The bloat I think people refer to are the useless dependencies a lot of > the prepackaged Red Hat RPM's seem to be afflicted with. For instance, > almost everything depends on you having the openldap and kerberos > libraries installed, even though most of the world doesn't use LDAP > directory services or Kerberos systems. Why should EVERYTHING have to > depend on these? Why do I have to be stuck with literally megabytes of > excess baggage I don't need and won't ever use? I suppose the term > "dependency hell" is one we're all familiar with.
Looking at the SPEC files coming from major distros you'ld see that most 'dependencies' that come up from the final binary RPM, are simple macros that you can define or disable. If you undefine the %with_ldap macro for instance, you get an RPM without ldap dependencies. At the very least you can grab the spec file, uncomment a macro or even remove the configure option pertaining to LDAP integration. This is all open source, people, and the code to build the packages is available IN THE SPEC FILE, and you can modify it to your own delight, AND BUILD YOUR OWN RPM PACKAGES without regressing to more primitive tarball technology. The problem is that a lot of people curse at the wind when they come across a seemingly brick wall that their particular whims or preferences for minimalist packages are not entertained by the distro maker, and then they continue on to blame the fact that RPM _the_ package manager itself is flawed for introducing so much bloat. After that they immediately fall back to more primitive technology, preaching that its the only one that works for them. > This speaks more of the fact that Red Hat's package management system is > very badly designed, and their packaging policy is really silly. > Granted, it's better than nothing, but having experimented with a few > other distros, there really are better package management systems out > there. The same accusation has been hurled at mandrake packagers, but really the job of distro makers is to _INTEGRATE_ various open source technologies so that you have a more cohesive system (LDAP), and possibily more secure (KERBEROS). Any move to integrate different software together directly conflicts with minimalist preferences for atomic packages. But technology must advance, features must keep up with computing requirements, and like it or not software must be integrated to use common libraries in order to save on code size and maintenance efforts. This issue goes to the very heart of those advocating integration vs. minimalism in software. Not a long time ago there were those that cried agony when the size of a 'Hello world' binary increased by more than 100% when using the GTK or Qt toolkits as opposed to coding one directly using the X api. True, there definitely is code bloat when using these toolkits, but tell me just how usable a 'Hello world' program is? _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fully Searchable Archives With Friendly Web Interface at http://marc.free.net.ph To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
