Re: debian

On Sat, 22 Apr 2006, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.linux, in article
<4atr48Fub9ioU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, J.O. Aho wrote:

Moe Trin wrote:

Extremely simple. Binary packages should be compiled for the specific
distribution/release that the user has. A package built for one distribution
often will not work in others. Given that distrowatch has hundreds of
different and not always compatible distributions, do you expect the author
of software on freshmeat.net to provide versions for all distributions?

In way they do, they provide the source code, just use the gcc and you get a
binary compiled for your distro.

Which works fine - but leaves the distribution's package manager non the wiser.

Most package managers do not look for the file that is required, but
consult a database of what packages are installed.

The configure script does look for things the build needs to build and should
give you an error message which leads you to get what is missing.

That's great - but the package manager doesn't know that you installed the
tarball of <$WHAT-EVER> that would satisfy the requirements of _other_
packages you later chose to install. Example - your distribution came with
version 1.2.2 of KDE. You looked on sourceforge, or freshmeat, or the
developers site, and you got a tarball of version 1.3.1, and installed
that. Now, you want to install kmumblefritz-1.3.1 - and you found a package
that your package manage can install - except it won't because you don't have
kde-1.3.x installed... see the problem? And that's even assuming that files
from a tarball and package manager even wind up in the same directory (they
won't - see the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard at http://www.pathname.com/fhs/)
without crapping on other dependencies. Both POSIX and Linux Standard Base
(http://www.linuxbase.org/spec/) try to make sense out of the hash, but
every @$(#$^**! distributor thinks they know better, and interprets
things differently.

IMHO knowing how to use configure should be somethign everyone should know.

../configure ? Sure - just as you should know something about how to use
make and a five minute lecture of what is in a Makefile. But as these are
used by everyone when they build their own source, few authors do things
absolutely consistently - there's the first of the problems. The second
problem is learning about how their distribution's package manager works -
whether it's apt, emerge, pkgtool, rpm or some distributor's so-called
"improved" version of someone else's application. A lot could be saved by
making it easy for ordinary people to take a source tarball, and make that
into a package that is compatible with their distribution's package manager.
'alien' sorta did something like that, but the bewildering maze of libraries,
and what-not, is not as simple as the 'a.out' days. Heck, I have been
using rpm since Red Hat 2.0, and rpp before that, and I still have no
desire to make up a 'src.rpm' that I can build into a binary.

Old guy
.

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