[Techtalk] Re: Uninstalling SOT office, etc. & SuSE 8.0/KDE 3

[David Merrill]

On Thu, May 02, 2002 at 03:48:31PM +0800, Jacqueline McNally wrote:
> At 07:00 AM 05/02/2002, Marian Routh wrote:
> 
> >Yes, I'm sorry to say it, but apparently Windows programmers don't have
> >a monopoly on what I consider rude software behavior - putting their
> >programs in start-up (in the Windows world), associating themselves
> >unasked, dumping files all over the hdd and in a non-standard manner,
> >and then being difficult to remove.  I must say, though, that this bad
> >behavior seems to be the exception rather than the rule in Linux.
> 
> It has been reported that SOT is a forked development of openoffice 641C, 
> with SOT added look and feel, and finnish lang support. Pierre and Malcolm 
> provided the keys to removing SOT Office in previous messages.
> 
> I must admit, before I knew about the /net switch, my first OpenOffice.org 
> install was frustrating. I have recently signed up on a Debian 
> OpenOffice.org list, and it appears that there will be a .deb for 
> OpenOffice.org 1.0 I am still not across what is free and non-free and all 
> the other naming attributes and things that go into developing a .deb, but 
> I wonder whether there is there any reason why the .deb package may contain 
> different things to the tar ball ? This may not be the case, but it's just 
> what I feel from reading the thread.

Debs are often different from the tarballs. Often they have patches
applied to them, defaults changed, installation locations changed,
etc. In fact, there was recently a bug filed against Debian's Mozilla
in which Mozilla asked Debian to change their identification string
because their version is so different from the stock Mozilla.

Also, Debian will add a man page if the upstream author didn't write
one, so every Debian executable has a man page. And other little
things like that wherever an upstream author's package doesn't fulfill
Debian's policy about what should be in a package.

There is plenty of precedent for this kind of practice elsewhere.
Kernels especially vary from vendor to vendor. Each distro picks and
chooses patches to apply to their kernel, based on their target market
and their engineers' opinions about what is stable and so on. Often
distros will be shipping a certain patch before it has been accepted
into the mainline kernel, for instance (ReiserFS, anyone?).

I personally can't wait for those .debs of OO!

-- 
David C. Merrill                         http://www.lupercalia.net
Linux Documentation Project                   david at lupercalia.net
Lead Developer                                 http://www.tldp.org

Microsoft is banking on Windows 2000 to be a Trojan Horse - they want to get
this into companies and then start exploiting inter-relationships with the
product. But I always say: beware of geeks bearing gifts.
	--Michael Gartenberg, Gartner Group Vice President.