On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 2:28 PM, jonathan d p ferguson<[email protected]> wrote:
> Interesting. I am not aiming to start some war involving oven mits, but you > seem to be > responding to something I did not write. Maybe I'm missing your point: > > I did not say "dependency handling" I said "the System Policy of Dependency > Checking." I know full well, that RPM, as a format is perfectly capable of > expressing dependency information. [Insert devil and details here]. The > problem is not in the format per-se (which was the point of my original post > anyway). The problem is in the System Policy which guides the People who > package the software. In other words, not having a requirement for > articulating dependencies in a systematic and automated way. Ok, I guess I misunderstood your initial words on the matter. I thought you were making the technical (and historical) criticism about RPM that we now both agree is false. I can now see how "system policy" in your description of Debian was meant to connote a social expectation for the distribution and not a technical requirement for the software used to manage packages. Your statement that Debian had support for "dependency checking" earlier than RPMs, "Now RPMs have _started_ supporting dependency checking", was what struck me as false history. Oven mits are removed.
