Re: Packaging and installation
* Erik Troan (ewt@redhat.com) [001024 08:50]:
> On Tue, 24 Oct 2000, Matt Taggart wrote:
>
> > How? If an application needs a particular library will it search the whole
> > filesystem for the .so? Or maybe just the library path? Will it be able to
> > determine library versions? By just looking at the name or actually looking at
> > the symbols etc? What happens if a user has a half installed version of a
> > library package built from a buggy CVS snapshot. Will that meet the dependency
> > and allow the application to install?
> >
>
> Libraries are reasonably easy as they do contain symbols. Testing to see
> if you have a new enough build of apache is much more difficult; the filesystem
> simply does not contain that kind of information. Trying to cruft together
> a packaging design which gets everything from the filesystem is bound to
> fail. There is a good reason dpkg, rpm and their predecessors use a separate
> database to store this information.
>
And all someone has to do to subvert the whole system is
to ./configure;make;make install. Nothing goes in the
database. Are you saying we should stop compiling things
on our own?
Wait - I already know your response...you're talking about
only those things that comprise LSB compatibility, and
THOSE things will be in the database. IMO that's a
terribly narrow approach to take. It solves LSB's problems
but not the problems of the end user who will certainly go
beyond LSB. And since LSB is an incredibly tiny portion of
any complete system, that's quite a big difference.
-Nick
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Nicholas Petreley Caldera Systems - LinuxWorld/InfoWorld
nicholas@petreley.com - http://www.petreley.com - Eph 6:12
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