[NTLUG:Discuss] best article in a while

[Chris Cox]

Fred wrote:
> Every Linux dude (and dudette) ought to read this and "listen up". This guy is
> right on the mark with his comments:
> 
> http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=1817&e=6&u=/zd/20030902/tc_zd/58657&sid=96120751

IMHO, a gross over simplification of the problem and its solution.
(in other words... he is wrong...overall)

He does make some okay points.  Obviously if you rebuild everything from source
and the ./configure works... things go together just fine.  It make
take time and disk space though.  So let's say we go with the idea
that source is safe... then we either have to store every package
of source that we are depending on (realizing that you may have
built packages that depended upon a totally different version... which
will now be broken until rebuilt) or we have to maintain a list
of dependencies to other sites and hope they don't take down the
code we were dependent upon.

If you want to know what creates "rpm hell" (dpkg hell, whatever... they
all have the problem... ALL).. it's dependencies on some other package.
If you want to guarantee absolute sucess with "install" you must
statically bind to your dependent modules or recode them and internalize
them into your own project to remove the dependency entirely.  There
is no other practical way (you could have code dependent paths to
different version levels of commonly used dependent libraries... but
the amount of trash after awhile will become quite large).

The person who wrote the article is painting a Utopian vision...
nope... sorry... not likely.

With that said.. the writer advocates Lindows as a possible solution...
and in a way, this is probably the right path... not Lindows per se,
but the idea of locking into a particular vendor's distribution.  As
long as you take your installs from the vendor dist and in their
prescribed manner, you "should" be ok.  There's no excuse when Redhat
(I like to pick on them since IMHO they best epitomize this) can't
get it's own dependencies right.... no excuse for SuSE either... but
I haven't had the problem with SuSE (so I don't pick on them).

I'd push on the vendor's to have more of the packages you want
working correctly through their package mechanism.... or
have fun putting things together on your own (which is also
fine, just not the target audience of this article).