Re: [9fans] There is no fork

[tlaronde@polynum.com]

2018-02-12 14:05 GMT+01:00 Ethan Grammatikidis <eekee57@fastmail.fm>:
> > On Mon, Feb 12, 2018, at 8:33 AM, Giacomo Tesio wrote:
>> 2018-02-12 2:10 GMT+01:00 Ethan Grammatikidis <eekee57@fastmail.fm>:
>>> linux-style package managers and bsd-style port trees facilitate and enable coupling.
>>
>> What a package manager really facilitate is version management.
>> That is when you want to use/update a software at version X that depends on libraries at version Y and Z.
>
> That's the marketing blurb, I've heard it a thousand times before. [...]
> So, for the last 10-12 years, maybe more, mountains of software have been produced on the assumption that it will be easy to find and install all their dependencies. That's only true for users of big 'distributions' which have lots of people, a large professional team or many contributors, to create and maintain the package tree.

>From a different point of view, the problem is also that the developers,
using some developing tools (for example the GNU automake and autoconf),
don't really know what they are using, or, since "GNU is not Unix",
don't verify that their code is POSIX compliant (and to what level etc.;
when I began using Unix by discovering Linux, I remember reading a book
explaining that for C programming, when linking, you will add always
the Glib library because "there are probably things you will need in
it!"...).

The amount of dependencies of some packages is simply appaling. (One
example is TeXlive, because using some macros involve using an amount
not necessarily kwown of "other" macros, for a lot of people it is
simpler to "take it all" just in order not to "fail"; and this is
when you need only a part of it that you discover that this "all"
depends on things that you do not have on your system---a C++
compiler and so on).

--
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                     http://www.kergis.com/
                       http://www.sbfa.fr/
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