Re: [PLUG] A pleasant installation surprise

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 10:27 PM, Art Clemons <artclemons@aol.com> wrote:
> I wish most Linux software either followed similar practices or
> alternatively lessened the number and types of dependencies.  All too often
> the dependency is some software that frankly I'll never actually need but
> it's included regardless.

Ugh - if similar practices means bundling dependencies then I can do
without that.  I don't want to download a 50MB tarball to compile
500kb of code.  Chromium does that, and you are still forced to use
half of the bundled libraries.

As a distro user, I say that this is just why you should let your
distro manage the dependencies.

As a distro maintainer, I want packages to clearly state their
dependencies, including version restrictions where they are
understood.  Looking at the gentoo package it seems like the calibre
build scripts could probably use a little love, but that seems to be
due to built-in assumptions that xdg should be installing to the root
filesystem (gentoo builds and installs packages with reduced
privileges, so this will fail - we don't want anything but the package
manager touching the root filesystem).

Rich
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