Too many dependencies? was: Is Linux always so frustating?

M. Fioretti m.fioretti at inwind.it
Wed Apr 7 18:29:23 UTC 2004


Premise: I am still running RH9, will directly switch to Fedora Core 2
when it is released. In the meantime, I subscribed to this list to get
familiar with FC. I am writing this both to point out a potential
issue with FC and to know more about it. Now, to the point:

On Wed, Apr 07, 2004 18:16:11 PM +0200, pinco (pinco at kiesperanto.org)
wrote:

> For some application, as I understood, I should have different
> programs because they depend on others: OpenOffice use Mozilla, so
> even if I don't like this browser I must have its libraries, if I
> decide to use Gnome I must have even the KDE libraries, because some
> programs require them, and so on.

I have already seen, in the original threads, a couple of people
answering more or less "so what?" to Nino's concern above.

Does OOo *really* require Mozilla to install on FC? If so, it *is*
bad. Like, originally, was the case of Abiword 2.0 on RH9: the
available RPM of this "lightweight" word processor would force the
install of a list of Gnome stuff (really unlikely, as KDE, to be found
on PCs who need lightweight) for a total of ~40 MB.

In general, careless packaging like this means that custom installs,
selecting packages by hand, are much less effective, since one has to
install (and later upgrade/maintain) much more than he will ever use
or need anyway. It means that more people are forced without a real
reason to upgrade the hardware, just to store bytes that will never be
used.

NOTE: Before trying to reply with any variation of the extremely
un-Linuxish "Hardware is so cheap" myth, please read the FAQ of the
project in my signature (hopefully coming to FC2 asap).

Now:

1) Can the OOo/Mozilla dependency be removed, if present, in FC2?
2) Can you point out other examples of dependencies which fill your
   hard disk without a real reason in Fedora Core? Let's hunt *this*
   kind of bugs for a change.

TIA,
	Marco Fioretti

-- 
Marco Fioretti                 m.fioretti, at the server inwind.it
Red Hat for low memory         http://www.rule-project.org/en/

It's always socially unacceptable to be right too soon. -- RAH





More information about the fedora-list mailing list