Richard wrote: >It seems to me that perhaps the key to unlocking this mess lies with > the Distros. Arch Linux has already made Python 3 the default > version, but AFAIK Red Hat (and others) have not.
I was going to suggest using various other distributions' search engines and checking which packages used a particular package as a dependency. The AUR search page for Arch is a good resource. Debian's search engine ( https://www.debian.org/distrib/packages ) is great for checking dependencies but not as good at going the other way and finding which packages need a dependency. However, if Paul is wondering what package might be able to use one database or another in order to consolidate installed databases, searching other distributions packages will only tell you what database they chose, not what database selections might be available when a package is built. I work with a package manager I wrote and I do use it to keep track of build dependencies and runtime dependencies. Again, that's only going to help determine which dependencies I decided to use in my builds, not which dependencies, I could have used. Looking at how other efficient distributions chose which packages and dependencies to use can be helpful (such as checking Arch for Python 3 only options as mentioned by Richard). If you want to know all the options, you might need to resort to reading the documentation or running configure and checking what build options it documents. Distributions concerned with efficiency and not having multiple packages (multiple databases, multiple scripting languages, etc.) that do the same thing typically tend to use the keep it simple principle and limit to one particular application per task. Checking which packages they include might be helpful. Zenwalk comes to mind as a distribution that uses that philosophy, but there are others that do it as well. Tracking which applications use a particular dependency is easier to do than trying to organize which applications could be rebuilt to minimize dependencies. Sincerely, Laura http://www.distasis.com/cpp -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
