Re: gEDA-user: On the nitty-gritty of user-experienced problems

[Daniel Nilsson <daniel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jan 14, 2005 at 04:23:47PM -0500, Stuart Brorson wrote:
> Hi --
> 
> 1.  The reason most people use off the shelf distros is to avoid
> dependency hell.  You are currently trapped in dependency hell because
> you prefer to roll your own Linux system.  That's fine, but don't
> complain when you get bitten by dependency problems.  In any event,
> I'd imagine you're smart enough to figure it out eventually.  And
> you'll be a more knowledgeable person for having been through the
> exercise.  

Exactly ! End users should in my mind install libraries from their
Linux/UNIX distribution and not attempt to resolve dependencies unless
they are a developer that needs to build against some specific version
of a library. If the libraries provided by your Linux distributor are
too old for a particular piece of software that you'd like to install,
you have a few choices in my mind;

1. Search the web to see if someone has provided a package (rpm, deb
   or whatever) for this newer library for your distro. backports.org
   provides this service for Debian users for example. Note though
   that you need to find a package that was indended for your version
   of the distribution, you can't just grab a single package from the
   latest version of your favourite Linux distro and expect that to
   work on an old system. That will bring you right back to dependency
   hell.

2. Upgrade your system to a newer linux distribution.

3. Attempt to install this newer library yourself, while remembering
   that this can be a very difficult task for end users who don't
   understand exactly how this library works. This is also quite
   challenging since you need to make sure that this new library is
   picked up instead of the default version that came with your distro
   (never overwrite something installed by a package with your own
   compile, you will just be asking for trouble).

4. Stay with an older version of this piece of software until either
   1,2 or 3 above has been taken care of.

-- 
Daniel Nilsson