Re: [newbie] what is wrong with dependencies
On Wednesday 19 September 2001 15:41, Jim Dawson wrote: It's such a problem that evidently XP has given up on the shared DLLs and each app will now have them in their own folder. My guess is that Bill Gates owns quite a bit of stock in companies that make hard drives. and RAM chips Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] what is wrong with dependencies
On Tue, 18 Sep 2001 18:21:10 -0500, Joseph Braddock [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I know dependencies are a pain, but so is Windows when some program being install takes it upon itself to update various DLLs that a new app needs, but breaks existing apps in the process. It's such a problem that evidently XP has given up on the shared DLLs and each app will now have them in their own folder. This is a VERY BAD idea. All it does is lead to resource (drive space, memory, CPU usage, etc.) wastage. Why is The GIMP only about 20MB when inatalled, while Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro can take up hundreds of megs? Because The GIMP relies on what's already there. The developers don't have to bother with reinventing the wheel; they can use shared libraries like libjpeg and libpng to do simple things like displaying images, giving coders more time to improve their own app. If you upgrade your libjpeg (which can display JPEGs) and libpng (which can display PNGs), you will be upgrading _all_ the applications that use those libs, including Mozilla and Konqueror. -- Sridhar Dhanapalan. There are two major products that come from Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence. -- Jeremy S. Anderson Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Re: [newbie] what is wrong with dependencies
I agree 100%. I was simply trying to point out that auto-updating dependencies would create the problems that Window$ has. To solve a real problem (incompatible DLLs), Microsoft has opted to go the hardware route -- hard drives are cheap. Unfortunately, it still doesn't solve the problem, and unless you use all Windows XP apps you still will be faced with the problem (but that's probably part of M$ marketing campaing). Apple OS X and Linux/Unix have approached this problem from a different angle and is much preferred. While having to deal with dependencies can be frustrating, at times, installing a new app doesn't break existing ones (well, unless you use --force :)). Joe On Tuesday 18 September 2001 11:55 pm, you wrote: On Tue, 18 Sep 2001 18:21:10 -0500, Joseph Braddock [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I know dependencies are a pain, but so is Windows when some program being install takes it upon itself to update various DLLs that a new app needs, but breaks existing apps in the process. It's such a problem that evidently XP has given up on the shared DLLs and each app will now have them in their own folder. This is a VERY BAD idea. All it does is lead to resource (drive space, memory, CPU usage, etc.) wastage. Why is The GIMP only about 20MB when inatalled, while Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro can take up hundreds of megs? Because The GIMP relies on what's already there. The developers don't have to bother with reinventing the wheel; they can use shared libraries like libjpeg and libpng to do simple things like displaying images, giving coders more time to improve their own app. If you upgrade your libjpeg (which can display JPEGs) and libpng (which can display PNGs), you will be upgrading _all_ the applications that use those libs, including Mozilla and Konqueror. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
[newbie] what is wrong with dependencies
Frankly - I am rather frustrated with the issues of dependencies. Almost each time I try to install an rpm file, or compile a tar.gz, I get a failed/missing dependencies error. I was told that this is just as in Windows in which programs need dlls. This is simply not true. When a Win32 developer prepares a package for publication he includes ALL the dlls needed (at least in 99% of the cases) and the install wizard then checks to see if there is a need to add them to the system or if something more recent is already installed. Now WHY don't rpms come with ALL the dependencies they need? Is it to reduce the size of the packages? But then, would it not be better to define a list of main dependencies which ALL distributions would install on each machine (even if the installation type is not development)? Also - sometimes, a dependency needs another dependency. What for? If the two dependencies are developed by the same people, why don't they immediately package them together. Finally, can I get any missing dependency from sites such as rpmfind.net? Are all dependencies rpm-packaged. I am sorry if these questions sound silly to those of you who are advanced newbies (-: I'm the real newbie-newbie :-) but take it from a 100% committed linux-lover as I have become: this is a problem which does NOT exist in this form in the much-hated Windows world. Any explanations would be welcome, cheers! Linux user 226850 _ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
RE: [newbie] what is wrong with dependencies
On Tue, 2001-09-18 at 04:16, Franki wrote: I think two other things would help,. a gui and console tool that does smart tarball installs and updates the rpm database for that app, and one that can get dependencies for you,, (goes to a mandrake update site list...etc etc. or asks for the CD, or both) preferably the same app. Debian has apt-get, which does exactly this. Rpm still doesn't do it, although rpmdrake (front-end to grpmi, which actually does the work) does a decent job of it. But for packages which Mandrake does not create, rpmdrake will do you no good :-( and a self extracting tarball, (sort of like winzips self extracting file,, a new tarball format that can have a shell or perl script wrapper around the actual tarfile that untars and starts the install for you.. (then updates the RPM databse...downloads dependencies etc etc) even if it was 10% bigger then a standard tarball, people would go for it because of the ease of install and removal and smart installing features, [snip] As a matter of fact, I have seen such a beast. Nessus (www.nessus.org) comes in a self-installing shell script. Just download and run nessus.sh (or whatever it was called), and the script will run, which actually unzips and untars the file, then checks dependencies, configures, compiles, and installs. At the beginning, it asks for the root password, so it can complete the install later on. It is very slick. Dave PGP signature
Re: [newbie] what is wrong with dependencies
On Tue, 18 Sep 2001 17:16:09 +0800, Franki [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I understand this issue and I comiserate Think about this though, KDE would have been much harder to write (and one hell of alot bigger most likely),, had it not used the QT libs, they conntain all the code for the GUI generating and numerous other things.. The benefits of using libs are at least two fold, if you have many apps using the same libs, they need only be loaded into memory once for all of them, which speeds things up greatly. They also provide for a more unified look between apps, (like KDE apps for example) Ditto with Gnome and its libs and nearly every other package.. If all packages had all the libs they required in them, then Mandrake would probably come on 8 CD's for just the basics and one distro would have hundreds of copies of the same libs in different RPM's... I personally think that they should offer full dependencies versions of RPM's for the newbies for download on the web... but it wouldn't be productive on the CD's to do it.. I believe you are referring to statically-linked RPMs. The problem with these is that, as the name suggests, they are static. For example, the statically-linked version of Opera will not benefit from upgrading QT, whilst dynamically-linked apps will. Open-source development is far more dependency-based, and so upgrading a lib like QT or GTK can benefit all apps that rely on them. I think two other things would help,. a gui and console tool that does smart tarball installs and updates the rpm database for that app, and one that can get dependencies for you,, (goes to a mandrake update site list...etc etc. or asks for the CD, or both) preferably the same app. Checkinstall is a console tool that does smart tarball installs and updates the rpm database for that app. Apt is an app that can get dependencies for you,, (goes to a mandrake update site list...etc etc. or asks for the CD, or both). Urpmi is a similar app, designed specifically for Mandrake. It has a GUI frontend: Software Manager (AKA RPMdrake). and a self extracting tarball, (sort of like winzips self extracting file,, a new tarball format that can have a shell or perl script wrapper around the actual tarfile that untars and starts the install for you.. (then updates the RPM databse...downloads dependencies etc etc) even if it was 10% bigger then a standard tarball, people would go for it because of the ease of install and removal and smart installing features, you could even make an app that keeps a updatable database of files that have a certain extension, like .exec and it runs suid or something and makes the file executable and runs the app if its clicked, (so that newbies don't have to learn chmod straight away) it would be potentially a security risk, but if the program is smart enough, it could be capable of foreseeing possible problems and risks, and then avoiding them...and it could prompt and warn for packages not listed in its database. its no more dangerous then downloading windows setup apps.. (although thats not saying much really is it?? ) No, it isn't. And this is why it isn't done. Newbies generally know nothing about security, so it is best to give them as little opportunity as possible to compromise their system's security. They would make a difference me thinks... and the latter one would bring us closer to the day where we are more powerful (compiling as opposed to installing binaries) and yet as easy to install... I think that would go along way to helping the newies issues.. (and sometimes the rest of us too.) Also, Mandrake should consider a Prefab lib section, (if selected during install, default would be on unless there are space issues) of as many of the common libs as possible,,, that way, even if they didn't get used, most people would be willing to put up with an extra 50 or 100MB of libs on their hard drive if it meant that 98% of lib dependencies never happend again.. This is already done to some degree, but not enough I think.. anyone with a 4 gig or above hard disk could put up with that,, (and like I said, make it install option.) Many newbies just do a full install. With today's huge hard drives, a 2GB installation is not much at all. If the entire first CD is installed, most dependencies should be taken care of. If a newbie uses a tool like Software Manager to install apps, they will not have to bother with dependencies at all. just some thoughts.. rgds Frank -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Andrei Raevsky Sent: Tuesday, 18 September 2001 3:24 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [newbie] what is wrong with dependencies Frankly - I am rather frustrated with the issues of dependencies. Almost each time I try to install an rpm file, or compile a tar.gz, I get a failed/missing dependencies error. I was told that this is just as in Windows
RE: [newbie] what is wrong with dependencies
Hi, I have a related question; is there no uninstall (not talking about rpms)? A lot of the apps I have installed (./configure;make;make install) have a make uninstall, but that means that you have to untar/gunzip the package again if/when you want to uninstall it; Has there ever been any thoughts on having some kind of flat file/db that stores all of a program's associated files (and if one/many of those files was shared/dl, then kept track of how many apps are associated with them), for the eventuality that someone decides they want to remove the app, and all traces? If there is, where/what is it? and if there isn't, is this not something that would be beneficial for system maintenace? i.e. if you end up removing an app, that when untarred/gunzipped took up 50MB (for example), but are only able to find (for sure) 35-40MB of that app's associated files, and you do this several times (which is typical/reasonable IMO), then you are wasting a LOT of hd space over time, and quite possible causing future dependency issues/conflicts. If there is NOT such an utility, and enough of the distros would be interested or the group that controls the RPM spec, I would be very willing/happy to start coding such an app in perl (or C, but for this, I would think perl is more suited); (n.b. I have NO idea if it would have to have anything to do with the distros/RPM group, so if anyone knows what would be the best way of going about it, please let me know). Thanks, David Charles On 18 Sep 2001, Dave Sherman wrote: On Tue, 2001-09-18 at 04:16, Franki wrote: I think two other things would help,. a gui and console tool that does smart tarball installs and updates the rpm database for that app, and one that can get dependencies for you,, (goes to a mandrake update site list...etc etc. or asks for the CD, or both) preferably the same app. Debian has apt-get, which does exactly this. Rpm still doesn't do it, although rpmdrake (front-end to grpmi, which actually does the work) does a decent job of it. But for packages which Mandrake does not create, rpmdrake will do you no good :-( and a self extracting tarball, (sort of like winzips self extracting file,, a new tarball format that can have a shell or perl script wrapper around the actual tarfile that untars and starts the install for you.. (then updates the RPM databse...downloads dependencies etc etc) even if it was 10% bigger then a standard tarball, people would go for it because of the ease of install and removal and smart installing features, [snip] As a matter of fact, I have seen such a beast. Nessus (www.nessus.org) comes in a self-installing shell script. Just download and run nessus.sh (or whatever it was called), and the script will run, which actually unzips and untars the file, then checks dependencies, configures, compiles, and installs. At the beginning, it asks for the root password, so it can complete the install later on. It is very slick. Dave Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
