Re: [PLUG] A pleasant installation surprise

[Art Clemons <artclemons@aol.com>]

On 05/11/2012 10:43 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> 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.

Once again though, Chromium can be compiled reliably.  Especially today 
with relatively large storage hardware, 50MB isn't a really big price.

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

I suspect most distro maintainers can't possibly keep track of every 
dependency for even most of the commonly used programs.

> 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).

Yet the python script on the Calibre website would likely produce a 
working version, once again at the cost of some bloat.  Yes one of the 
major weaknesses and major strengths of Linux is precisely that there 
are multiple ways of accomplishing the production of working software, 
but unless distro maintainers are going to spend years compiling up 
every possibly needed piece of software and every possibly needed 
library, there are always going to be unmet dependencies if just because 
people want new and improved.

You don't want bloat and I want working software even at the cost of 
some bloat.
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