[NTLUG:Discuss] GNOME and GNUCash install difficulties

[Kevin Brannen]

Christopher Browne wrote:
> 
...
> That still may leave some inconvenience in trying to retrofit to
> SuSE 6.1.  This maybe SuSE's sign that you need to upgrade to
> "6.newer."
> 
> [Does it irritate anyone else that so many Linux systems are
> nearly as slavishly dependent on regular version upgrades as is true
> for the moves between non-interoperable versions of MS Office?  Off
> the soapbox...]
> --

<soapbox>

Yes!  Loading from a CD distro and getting it customized & stable is
pretty easy now-a-days, IMHO.  But trying to upgrade (or sometimes
add) 1 package that has lots of lib dependencies can be a real killer.

IMNSHO, I think a lot of the blame goes to the GNU folks who foisted 2
incompatible versions of glibc on us in a very quick timeframe (or it
seemed quick to me. :-)  That had a tremendous cascading effect on the
other libs, which cascaded to many apps.

On a related note, I tried to take /usr/i486-linux-libc5/lib out of my
LD_LIBRARY_PATH earlier this evening and had some very rude suprises
(I tried that because gnome was finding the wrong libs and failing). 
If I had to name the top 2 Open Source Software problems, #1 would be
lack of business apps (slowing getting better), and #2 would be the
inability to move forward "as a whole" when change is needed.  (M$
seems to do better here, but then you're also stuck with the problem
of separating the OS from the Apps. :-)

Examples of #2 comes everytime I have to upgrade, then finding
programs which ran just fine before, now suddenly failing.  Why? 
Because the app uses /usr/bin/wish4.0 while the new distro only
provides /usr/bin/wish8.0 (and just uninstalled wish4.0--ARGH!!!). 
Will the app work with wish8.0?  How should I know!?   And there is no
new version of the app out.  (Fortunately they all have worked so
far.)  Other examples could be provided if I thought about it enough.

I really like SuSE.  I think they strike a good balance between OSS
and comercial software; but I do hate it when they do this to me.  To
be fair, I don't think this is just a SuSE problem; I hear of similiar
problems with RH (and others) too.

And before someone tries to tell me that RPMs are the answer, please
point me to a good RPM tool (w/ GUI please) that not only supports
binary RPMs, but source ones too.  I've yet to find one that does
source.  I'm not sure what RPM *should* stand for (i.e. I haven't come
up with good replacement words for the acronym), but I find them hard
to use.  If it wasn't for rpm2cpio, I wouldn't have installed some
packages I really need and use on a daily basis.

And all that adds up to making it hard to upgrade distros manually,
forcing me to use the distro upgrade more frequently than I probably
should have to.  [I'd love to skip SuSE v6.5, but the thought of
having kernel v2.4 is so alluring. :-]

</soapbox>

Kevin