The dependency stuff in Linux is really frustrating . I mean when I download some new software and try to install it , it shows some dependency problems. To give you an example recently I downloaded a a mail client called mahogany which had 2 dependencies. Now I downloaded the reqd package to solve it. To my surprise that package had 5 unsolved dependencies !
I gave up the idea thinking that I would be running around in circles. I had same nightmarish experience when I tried to upgrade rpm 3 to rpm 4 Is there some distribution available which gets over this problem ? Linux is so well organized in other ways then why this irrational dependency thing . Why can't developers make standalone software ?
On Wednesday 18 July 2001 15:55, you wrote:
The dependency stuff in Linux is really frustrating .
The only sane way is to use debian with apt. It (mostly ) automagically downloads and installs dependencies along with the package. Morover it will not leave the system in limbo. If it cannot install all dependencies it will not install the package and give you the option of removing.
On Wednesday 18 July 2001 04:45 pm, jtdyahoo wrote:
On Wednesday 18 July 2001 15:55, you wrote:
The dependency stuff in Linux is really frustrating .
The only sane way is to use debian with apt.
Can anyone please tell me from where do I get Debian Distribution? Is it affordable ? Why can't Red Hat people manage rpm's like Debian folks ? Heck Linux is confusing ;-)
Sometime on Jul 19, Nikhil Joshi assembled some asciibets to say:
Can anyone please tell me from where do I get Debian Distribution? Is it affordable ?
debian.org. Yes, it is affordable, it is the only real free distribution, and the only one endorsed by RMS.
Philip
On Friday 20 July 2001 01:05, Philip wrote:
Sometime on Jul 19, Nikhil Joshi assembled some asciibets to say:
Can anyone please tell me from where do I get Debian Distribution? Is it affordable ?
debian.org. Yes, it is affordable, it is the only real free distribution, and the only one endorsed by RMS.
Philip
Or buy a set from me at costs - Rs.40 * 3 = 120. Potato r1. Can't lend you mine as i mess around with them all the time. However release of woody is around the corner and you may want to wait. It will have 2.46, KDE2.1 and several other goodies.
On Friday 20 July 2001 11:41 am, jtdyahoo wrote:
Or buy a set from me at costs - Rs.40 * 3 = 120. Potato r1. Can't lend you mine as i mess around with them all the time. However release of woody is around the corner and you may want to wait. It will have 2.46, KDE2.1 and several other goodies.
Thanks for offering me the Cd's . But I would like to know from where does one get the Cd's in the first place like I get Red Hat from PCQ or CHIP. Or do I have to download the thing which I think is impossible as I am on dial-up.
On Saturday 21 July 2001 06:18, Nikhil Joshi wrote:
Thanks for offering me the Cd's . But I would like to know from where does one get the Cd's in the first place like I get Red Hat from PCQ or CHIP. Or do I have to download the thing which I think is impossible as I am on dial-up.
Freeos.
You can get their phone nos and address from the above url.
--- Nikhil Joshi nikhiljosh@runbox.com wrote:
The dependency stuff in Linux is really frustrating . I mean when I download some new software and try to install it , it shows some dependency problems.
Actually, the problems are with the RPM system, and not Linux. Traditional UNIX software distributions have always been as zipped tar archives (the files with .tar.gz and .tgz extenstions). Those are starightforward to download and install.
However, Red Hat, in an unfortunate bid to emulate a major desktop OS manufacturer who I will not name, created the rpm format, which rolls several functions into one package. It is of course an archival/ extraction package, but in addition also tries to manage some Windows-style registry and version control functionality. It is thus overlarge and complicated, which factors are compounded by it's makers' desire to make it simple to use.
Red Hat's RPM upgrades have also broken backward compatibility, which in essence is your problem.
My suggestion to you is therefore to just download the .tar.gz file of mahogany, or whatever, su to root, copy it into your /usr/local directory, unzip using "tar -xvzf <archive_name>", and then compile, or whatever it is that you have to do to get things working. If nothing else, at least it will keep your life simple!
Rgds,
Krishnan
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On Wed, 18 Jul 2001, Nikhil Joshi wrote:
The dependency stuff in Linux is really frustrating . I mean when I download some new software and try to install it , it shows some dependency problems. To give you an example recently I downloaded a a mail client called mahogany which had 2 dependencies. Now I downloaded the reqd package to solve it. To my surprise that package had 5 unsolved dependencies !
I gave up the idea thinking that I would be running around in circles. I had same nightmarish experience when I tried to upgrade rpm 3 to rpm 4 Is there some distribution available which gets over this problem ? Linux is so well organized in other ways then why this irrational dependency thing . Why can't developers make standalone software ?
These kinds of problems are automaticaly taken care of in debian distro. The 'apt' tool is very intelligent.
Regards pankaj
Nikhil wrote:
The dependency stuff in Linux is really frustrating ... I gave up the idea thinking that I would be running around in circles. I had same nightmarish experience when I tried to upgrade rpm 3 to rpm 4
The only problem is the upgrade from rpm 3 to rpm 4, since the switch was not made in a very sane way. And the dependencies will never lead you in circles. Get a bigger harddisk partition! ;-)
About dependencies, this is the basic reason why so much software can be packed in so little space on the installer CD that you used. All the packages aggressively share libraries and these are put in separate packages which show up as dependencies.
Compare the situation with Windows where all packages include their own sets of DLL's in the installers. The basic idea of a library is to share code, but if everyone starts including their own library, the whole point is defeated. This leads to the existence of multiple copies of DLL's on the system, which are managed very sloppily. I hope you will know what I am saying when I remind you of the number of times that people have to reformat reinstall Windoze systems when the c:\windows\system folder goes haywire and you need special system tools to keep track of registries and DLL's.
On GNU/Linux, the whole thing is avoided by being strict with dependency checking. Any library that is shared by more than one package are put in a separate dependency so that they don't have to be duplicated. Take the package called "gal" in GNOME for example - it simply contains an arbitrary bunch of libraries that are extensively shared by too many packages and don't find a place in any particular package. Such a practice allows you to depend on a single package manager to keep your system files in a perfectly sane state.
Is there some distribution available which gets over this problem ?
The apt package manager used by Debian GL is the best when it comes to managing these things. But mind you, that is not because the .deb format is better than .rpm, or that the RPM system is not well designed. It is better simply because it is backed by sane, strictly enforced policies about creating packages, which is compounded by the fact that almost all the .deb come from a single source, the Debian project.
Against this RPM packages are used by many systems - RHL, Mandrake, SuSE ... and then there are the "contrib" packages. Just go to http://rpmfind.net to look for your favourite rpm, and you will face a number of sources to choose from. If you keep in mind to use only certain package sources on your system you will never run into problems. Or an even better idea is to download tarballs and then create rpm packages out of them before installing. But directly using a tarball is very bad - you can easily lose track of all the files on your system. The makefiles normally contain correct info for installation, but people neglect the section on uninstallation, so that there is no sane way to remove software installed from a tarball.
Why can't developers make standalone software ?
Just think of the mess in your Windoze system and you will know why.
SameerDS.
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On Wednesday 18 July 2001 07:15 pm, Sameer D. Sahasrabuddhe wrote:
It is better simply because it is backed by sane, strictly enforced policies about creating packages, which is compounded by the fact that almost all the .deb come from a single source, the Debian project.
Why can't Red Hat guys have sane and strict policies ?
Or an even better idea is to download tarballs and then create rpm packages out of them before installing.
Sorry I cannot comprehend what you mean . Please enlighten.
P.S. I even tried the tarballs and tried to ' make , ./configure ' and stuff like that but I got some hard to comprehend errors :(
Just for curiosity : In old Unices (Hope I spelled it right ;-) ) how were the apps installed?
Sometime on Jul 19, Nikhil Joshi assembled some asciibets to say:
Or an even better idea is to download tarballs and then create rpm packages out of them before installing.
Sorry I cannot comprehend what you mean . Please enlighten.
You can create your own rpms from tarballs. man rpm for more info.
I even tried the tarballs and tried to ' make , ./configure ' and stuff like that but I got some hard to comprehend errors :(
You've got to read all the docs that come with tarballs, and then try and isolate any errors that occur. Don't worry about warnings. Most programs are written in C, and if you know C, the errors are somewhat understandable.
Just for curiosity : In old Unices (Hope I spelled it right ;-) ) how were the apps installed?
tarballs. In the really old ones, they just copied the entire source, and compiled it manually. Then they made make to make making things easier. Then they started tarring the source to transport it, and compressing it to make it smaller. Most often though, they just needed to transport diffs that basically had the diffs between the orgs and the new versions.
Philip
Nikhil wrote:
Why can't Red Hat guys have sane and strict policies ?
If you use rpms that are released by Redhat, they will have very few problems. The conflicts arise because, as I had mentioned, there are many different sources for rpm packages and the people who make them don't have a coherent set of policies - they just do their own thing! As against this, the debs usually come from the Debian project itself ... people don't usually get their packages from other sources even if they exist.
Or an even better idea is to download tarballs and then create rpm packages out of them before installing.
Sorry I cannot comprehend what you mean . Please enlighten.
You can use a source tarball to create your own rpm package. The rpm command will do almost everything for you - configure, compile, etc. Read more about it in the book called "Maximum RPM" http://www.rpmdp.org/rpmbook/
I even tried the tarballs and tried to ' make , ./configure ' and stuff like that but I got some hard to comprehend errors :(
First install all the necessary development libraries. These are packages that have the label -devel appended to their names.
In old Unices (Hope I spelled it right ;-) ) how were the apps installed?
No idea; but I think it must have been tarballs all the way!
SameerDS.
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On Wed, 18 Jul 2001, Sameer D. Sahasrabuddhe spewed into the ether: <snip>
problems. Or an even better idea is to download tarballs and then create rpm packages out of them before installing. But directly using a tarball is very bad - you can easily lose track of all the files on
A> See cleaninstall at sourceforge.net B> $./configure --prefix=/ur/local/packagename-version rm -rf to uninstall
Devdas Bhagat
Devdas wrote:
A> See cleaninstall at sourceforge.net
Will take a look at that ...
B> $./configure --prefix=/ur/local/packagename-version
Followed by export PATH="$PATH:/ur/local/packagename-version" ??
SameerDS.
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On Sun, 05 Aug 2001, Sameer D. Sahasrabuddhe spewed into the ether: <snip>
Followed by export PATH="$PATH:/ur/local/packagename-version" ??
If you wish. Or symlinks for the commonly used applications.
And export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/packagename-version/lib
Devdas Bhagat
Devdas wrote:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/packagename-version/lib
Arrrgghhhh ... no thank you! :-D
SameerDS.
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On Wed, 18 Jul 2001, Nikhil Joshi wrote:
Linux is so well organized in other ways then why this irrational dependency thing . Why can't developers make standalone software ?
I think this was discussed on LWN or Slashdot a while back ("Shared dependencies hell") with respect to GnuCash. Making standalone software would probably mean using bloated statically linked executables. That's generally not a good thing (e.g compare the size of the statically linked version of Opera 5.0 with the dynamically linked one).
I have also found that you can sometimes get away with using lower version dependencies than those actually specified if you compile the source yourself, though you may need to do a bit of tweaking. Binary packages seem to be built on bleeding edge systems and thus the need for the latest versions of the dependencies. No real solution here. The Linux development model demands that you release early and release often.
-YoGeSh
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jtdyahoo -
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Pankaj Jangid -
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Yogesh Ginde