On Sun, Jun 22, 2008 at 11:00 PM, Richard Hughes <hughsient@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, 2008-06-22 at 20:02 +0200, Denis Washington wrote:
> The distro model is nice (and arguably better than the LSB Package API)
> if the packages you like to have are in the repos in sufficiently new
> versions. But if you need to go past that (bleeding edge versions, not
> widely spread apps), things get more difficult currently. Especially
> propietary applications just cannot be distributed by the distros
> directly.

Right. These packages are compiled against system versions of libraries.
Do we choose the F9 or rawhide version of xulrunner to link against?
There's substantial API and ABI changes between distro versions for the
majority of shared libraries.

> I don't think this is a corner case at all. For one thing, propietary
> applications might just don't play a role _because_ there is no really
> good distribution method for them - the typical chicken-and-egg problem.

Incorrect. Most closed-source applications I have to use are installed
with an installer binary or script, which just smatters files on the
hard drive in /opt. There's just no need to register these with the
native system package manager as there are no updates repositories nor
dependency tracking required.>

You you like an opinion on this, well, that it is mine. For example, look ad Oracle Client 11g
application : it. as released with a tarball or so, have on it:

- a full stack of perl
- a full stack of shared library : glibc in primisis.

So what have to do un poor packager manager with this ? Disable the deps and hope the best. Other, as MQ client, are released with RPM : with deps disabled anyway. But not all
are equal : for example websphere. Sure it is tricky to package it but almost don't force me to disable the deps: I DON'T WANT DISABLE THE DEPS.

IMHO, YMMV as usual