The future of Linux - architecture and package inter-dependencies

[Thomas M Steenholdt]

Arjan van de Ven wrote:
>> 2)
>> to be able to upgrade the applications I most use without having to
>> re-install the operating system
> 
> that's a hard one, see below
> \
>> firefox 1.5 is hard to build for FC4 due to the dependencies, not to talk
>> about evolution 2.4 openoffice and KDE just to name some. The dependencies
>> on a miriad of packages make the effort ridicolously hard.
>>

If you want to use newer version of packages, there are normally no 
problems in doing so - The usual problem lies in the fact that the 
RAWHIDE packages are intended for newer core packages and components.

You brought firefox 1.5 up, so let me use that as a simple example to 
illustrate my point.

It's not possible to build the rawhide firefox packages on FC4, because 
they are MADE to REQUIRE cairo, which is not included in FC4.

This does not mean that you cannot run firefox on FC4, though, you just 
need a) firefox packages that does not require cairo or b) cairo 
installed on your system.

Check out nrpms.net - there are updated gnome/firefox/xx packages 
available for FC4 that you can upgrade most of your operating system 
without reinstalling.

I'm currently running firefox 1.5.0.1 without cairo with great success 
on FC4.

So what you need is a third party repository that give you the updated 
(not just security patched) versions of your core components... For most 
production (enterprise style) systems this is a bad idea, which is why i 
don't think we should ever expect this from a serious distro that should 
be usable in those places too.

Hope this helps

/Thomas