Re: Dependencies

From: Robert Melson (melsonr_at_NOSPAM.earthlink.net)
Date: 06/28/04 

Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 16:54:53 GMT

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On Monday 28 June 2004 02:44, Michel Talon wrote:

> Robert Melson <melsonr@nospam.earthlink.net> wrote:
>>
>> Possibly so. I'd like to get an idea, though, of what others see in
>> this regard. As I said, it started as a matter of curiosity -- why
>> am
>> I seeing so many apps requiring python. I don't doubt that there are
>> other, similar strangenesses to be found.
>>
>
> If you follow this newsgroup you will see that similar problems occur
> regularly. The traditional answer is "use portupgrade" (which means
> you need to recompile hundred of ports with no firm guarantee it will
> work at the end). I happen to have used FreeBSD since well before
> portupgrade existed and not having been afflicted with vast dependency
> problems of this sort, perhaps i was lucky, but i had several hundreds
> of ports and most frequently a make make install in the considered
> port worked OK without any fuss. It seems that since the introduction
> of
> portupgrade, port developers have been in love with this tool so that
> they happily introduce such strict dependencies in the ports that it
> has a lot of work to do :-)
> Personnally, after having been bitten a fair number of times, when
> i want to use some new free gadget and there exists a Windows version,
> i download this one, and get the advantage of easy installation, easy
> desinstallation, no fuss, and soft tested and working. Precisely since
> you were speaking of python, it is the case that interesting python
> applications (wxpython, boa-constructor, scipy etc.) work very well
> under Windows, without any fuss. Trying to compile that under FreeBSD,
> i entered a dependency hell and never seen the end. Needless to say
> situation is not better under Debian stable, i am convinced that
> sophisticated package management systems cause far far more trouble
> than they solve problems.
>
>
>
> --
>
> Michel TALON
Michel:

Yeah. I've been with FBSD since 2.1.7 and have seen increasing
complexity introduced with each new release. Despite that, it's better
than any of the alternatives, particularly Gates' universal computer
virus.

As for your contention, I'm not sure I'd want to place the blame
entirely on port/package management tools in general or on portupgrade
specifically. I think, rather, that the problem is a very human one on
the part of the ports maintainers -- if it ain't broke, don't fix it,
which leads them to take the easy way out on makefiles, dependencies,
etc, rather than doing a complete audit of a port/package and
eliminating dependencies and requirements that really aren't. It's the
path of least resistance and it's carelessness, in a sense. It's
sloppy thinking and sloppy practice.

Bob

- --
Robert G. Melson Nothing is more terrible than
Rio Grande MicroSolutions ignorance in action.
El Paso, Texas Goethe
melsonr(at)earthlink(dot)net
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