[geeks] RedHat restructure

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

On Wed, Nov 05, 2003 at 11:52:35AM -0500, Kevin wrote:

> I don't believe so but i would really rather deal with that myself.  I

Same here, except that when you get into hundreds of packages, it is
very difficult to track dependencies manually.

I would like to have some advisory dependency checking.  

Dependency checking does not have to be bad.

Debian is trying to be a 100% solution, doing everything, and rpm is
much the same.

> frequently leave out packages and add them myself from source.  If it

Same here.  

Sometimes a package might have a dependency that can be ignored.  It
checks, and if the dependency is not present, it disables a feature or
whatever it needs to do, and continues on.  In those cases, I don't
want the dependency system to bitch at me.

All of them should have two levels: required and optional.

Further, package systems often ignore legitimate dependencies from third
parties.  They should not assume that their version 1.5 is newer than
my 1.5.  Any conflict should be resolved by the admin, not the package
system.

However, there are valid reasons for the behavior of some package
systems like rpm or Debian's apt.

Both systems are trying to ensure that packages have been tested
together.  The user can be assured that everything he installs will work
with everything else.  This is important to a lot of people.

If you are trying to provide support, then you don't want packages from
outside of your control, or outside of known "official" sources.

> started bitching at me about how i have to install A in order for it
> to install B, i would be super pissed.  That is actually one of the
> thinks i like about Slackware.  It does what i tell it to do and it
> doesn't give me any lip about it :}

I doubt you need to worry.  I think any dependency checking in future
Slackware will be advisory.

I do wish though, that the package system had a full file manifest for
each package.  The listings in /var/log/packages/<package> are not
always correct, because the install script does some transformations and
linking.

For example, /bin/bash is /bin/bash2 in the package file listing.

I like to use some programs I wrote to find missing and extraneous files
in my base system, and some files cannot be easily accounted for.



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