Re: Debian/Alpha suggestions
On Tue, 22 Sep 1998, Bob McElrath wrote:
> I just finished installing debian-alpha on my 533MHz LX164 system, and did
> not see this problem (I have a Matrox Millenium II).
Great. There are some problems that are pretty widespread with X and
Matrox boards, though. I believe someone here is taking this up with the
XFree people.
> Biggest problems I saw were dependencies (I did an ftp install from
> ftp.debian.org). There are multiple copies of many packages, many packages
> are named in goofy ways (often with version numbers as part of the name,
> which seems to destroy dependencies). console-tools is screwed...it didn't
> seem to install properly, and caused other packages to not install properly
> because the libraries libcfont, libconsole, libctutils (all .so) were
> missing. Likewise with lesstif (for some reason some packages were looking
> for lesstifg as a dependency -- ddd for example).
Yeah, this can be a pain, but the packages are named a certain way for a
reason. Unfortunately, many of the dependencies are screwy because of
this.
> As I have time I will generate more specific bug reports for the
> maintainers. I didn't write down *every* error message I came by (besides,
> they scrolled by so *fast!* ;)
When you get a chance, just forward a good list (best you can do) to this
list and we'll all grab a chunk and fix it. I'm going to try to get
another dependency audit report soon, so most of that should pop up too.
> Here are a list of dependencies required by various packages that were not
> found anywhere on the ftp.debian.org archive:
>
> jdk1.1, pgp, gnupg, festival, guile, lesstifg.
jdk isn't and probably won't be out with us for awhile...at least until I
can verify that the sonames of the libs between us and RedHat are the same
(linking to improper sonames could cause big problems). pgp and gnupg are
available on nonus.debian.org. Lesstif is my personal favourite, so I'll
look into that after I stop wrestling with binutils and egcs (and jade and
dpkg and... :P). As for guile and festival, they should be fine last I
checked. Then again, these could be related to the libstdc++ changeover.
> In general, it seems a horrible idea to make versions part of the names of
> packages. Some are named things like jdk1.1, and some even worse, like
> blah3.4-08-23-1998. It seems to me that dates as part of the package names
> also destroys dependencies.
Yes and no. They are named that way mostly because the x86 maintainers
wanted to install more than one version of each lib for various reasons.
Plus, they went through the libc5 -> glibc changeover which necessitated
some ugliness on that front.
> Another problem I had was that there was little checking of available disk
> space. The first time I installed on to a 2 gig partition, and filled it up
> in the course of the install. The second time I used a 8 gig partition, and
> was more conservative in my package selection... ;)
This is a generalised problem. For best results on resolving this, file a
bug report against the base-disk package. I'd like to see this resolved
also since I've run into this problem before on the x86 as well.
> Perhaps the XSuSE server might be distributed with debian-alpha for those of
> us using things like Matrox cards?
Not a bad idea. I'd actually like to see alot of changes to xfree's
servers, but can't find the patches that we were applying to the original
tarballs :( What is the licensing on the XSuSE server right now?
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