[Techtalk] Re: Linux Versions

[Poppy]

On Thu, 2002-05-02 at 21:01, Caitlyn Martin wrote:
> 
> That hasn't happened to me much.  Oh, I've had to hunt down where a
> certain library was packaged and download an additional RPM, but I've
> probably wasted more time with poorly documented makefiles and
> conflicting library requirements for different software in my day.
> 
I'd have to agree with that. The few things that I've had to compile
myself, while it seems to work better once _I_ do it, I spend forever
reading through the Makefile, hoping I got everything right. And I've
seen far more Makefiles go wrong than RPMs ... plus, if they don't think
to include the code for 'make install' I won't have a darn clue where
everything goes!

<snip>
> 
> I think I am.  I'm not saying there never have been hassles, but
> compared to DLL hell in Windows, rpm dependency issues are truly minor.
> 
I dunno about that. The one complaint I have about RPMs is that I'd like
to see more static ones, I've come into some hairy dependency issues,
and there's been software that I've chosen not to use that I would have
liked to try out because I couldn't solve the dependency issues. I
probably have comflicting versions of various libraries (and more)
simply because program A needs one while program B needs another. It
would have been really nice to be able to get one of them statically,
even if I had to compile it myself. Too, I usually wound up getting
another RPM which contained the extra library I needed.... along with a
few other files that I don't need.

And, given that my day job is doing tech support for a Windows program,
I see fairly few DLL problems... and when I do see them, it's usually
either a conflict with hardware (which the software wasn't tested with)
or a problem elsewhere (usually in a data file) which is causing a
problem with a particular DLL. Have seen very, very few
honest-to-goodness DLL conflicts... but then, perhaps I'm just lucky in
that I wasn't doing tech support in the early days of Windows 9x.  =)



Then again, part of my disgruntledness with the dependency issues is
that I run on dial-up, so I get stuck needing to wait for a web-page to
load, download the file, etc ad nauseum. And that was before I added
more memory, so I feel like I aged significantly just waiting for the
download.

-- 
Poppy,
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