Re: package system: questions, suggestions, alien

Alex> Maybe we should all move to apt-get... No Debian Perl please. Even Perl core developers admit that Debian makes all Perl look bad. :-P So here's the rub: who's going to create that database (and later keep it up-to-date)? I don't want that job, thank you. Steve Youngs is already working flat-out. Remember, a substantial minority, perhaps a majority, of our packages are orphans without an external maintainer. How are we going to make sure that packages with version dependencies can actually fulfill them? (I wanted to try some Debian package the other day, but it wouldn't install because the dependency was == and the installed dependency library was too recent. This happens a _lot_ with GTK libraries.) What do we do about packages like JDE that not only depend on pre-release versions of other packages, but install them? Wouldn't this effort be better directed at the 800-pound gorilla of dependencies, GNU vs XEmacs? And maybe on disciplining Ben Wing and other people who are creating APIs willy-nilly. And doing APEL right? Is this really that big a deal? I don't see lots of problems in user land (c.e.x and xemacs-beta) that really look like dependency issues. Instead, most of the time people need to upgrade for out-and-out bug fixes. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN My nostalgia for Icon makes me forget about any of the bad things. I don't have much nostalgia for Perl, so its faults I remember. Scott Gilbert c.l.py