On Sat, 14 Dec 2002, -JhAzEr- wrote: > pretty good observation! i agree with you. but in terms of > dependencies, i think it's not appropriate to say that it lacks it. > Slackware's philosophy is simplicity and ease of use. let's say for > example you're building gnome from tarballs. you'll notice that > dependencies for building gnome are quite minimal compared to other > distros. that's the difference between pkgtool and rpm. rpm was built > to track down those dependencies while pkgtool was designed to > simplistically allow you to build it with ease based on those minimal > dependencies. ;)
Then you're not advocating the use of pkgtool over rpm/deb. You're advocating minimialist packaging versus cohesive/integrated packaging. You can do minimalist packaging in RPM/DEB if you wanted to, and there are RPM based distros out there that do exactly that. The complaint of why gnome of some distros run on plain vanilla installs versus gnome on redhat needs a gazillion other seemingly unrelated packages is simply because redhat chose to bundle stuff like LDAP or kerberos authentication to some base package of gnome. So let's not knock the package manager, people. Let's not knock the dependency checks. They are there for a reason - and that's to enforce the build-time integration decisions of the VAR linux distro maker. Join the development list for your favorite distro and lobby for more atomicity in their packages if you need. The mandrake cooker list has quite a few advocates of this and it has sobered the tendency for creeeping featurism. Or at the very worst case, FORK from their base and make your own distro that suits you. I myself have create my own fork from mandrake 7.2, and the first thing i did was remove all the senseless useless packages i deemed necessary to remove. It's open source - use it! And use the technology that comes with it to further your expertise. Don't come crawling back to the stone age of tarballs upon experiencing catastrophic failures. All you can achieve with a "./configure ; make ; make install" is a system that will hopelessly be unmaintainable especially if someone else were to take over your role of administering that particular box. I'm sure the first thing that 'next in line admin' would be to reinstall. I know i would. _ 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]
