Re: Woody to sid to Woody Dependency Hell
JOSEPH A NAGY JR said:
> This is why I HATE using binaries. Dependency hell. I've had much better
> luck installing from source (at least on my RH system). First (and last)
> time I tried installing from source on my deb system was a failure as
> well.
there is no dependency hell if the binaries are well tested. You said
you were using unstable..well thats what you get for using unstable :)
having compiled many things from source myself over the years my experience
is that source compilations are much more likely to have dependency hell
then binary. The worst such example in my experience was earlier releases
of gnome, I remember back in...1999? I was compiling gnome, took about
12 hours, and ~40 different source packages to get it up and going. I
had to completely trash my debian 2.1 install when debian 2.2 came out
as I was still in a "compile from source" mode at the time, and my
debian 2.1 system was SO incredibly overrun by self built binaries,
everything from X, to who knows what else that upgrading to 2.2 would
of fried it all I think. A more modern example would be to try to build
something like openldap(with all the options debian uses) on something
like solaris. I think it took me about 6 hours..and though I am not
a developer I have compiled several thousand(?) apps in my time so I'm
quite good at it..
now if for some reason you like the bleeding edge, source may be the only
way to go. I used to like the bleeding edge several years ago but am much
more conservative now, and much less headaches as a result(i.e. none). All
my debian systems run woody, including my desktops & laptop(& soon my
zaurus).
I personally don't care about the latest KDE, gnome, openoffice, mozilla,
antialiased fonts, font "hinting", the latest X, the latest cyrus or
openldap...probably why my systems usually are so stable..no bleeding edge
stuff. On occasion I do recompile debs from testing to woody(spamassasin
comes to mind), but I always check the buglist before doing so. As a
result however I am very careful at picking my hardware for my linux
machines.
just got done fighting with Network UPS Tools on redhat 7.3, for some
reason the *newer* version of this package on redhat does not include
the cyberpower driver, and yet the *older* version on debian does, like
you I had to compile from source to get it working. Tried using the old
driver on the newer package but the UPS client software refused to
communicate with it(though the server side was working fine).
but that's me.
nate
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