[ILUG] Linux Frustration

[Justin Mason]

Rick Moen said:

> > Connectiva went the whole hog, and moved to apt on top of RPM.
> 
> It's instructive to note what _else_ they had to do:  They had to start
> massively rewriting packages to implement a coherent package policy.  
> Also, they have ongoing problems nonetheless on account of the
> granularity problem.

It'd be nice to see Red Hat or the other RPM-based distros take this
tack, and start revising their dependencies appropriately for their
next major release.

However IMO there's another angle.  It'd also be nice to see the GNOME and
KDE folks, especially those releasing "bleeding-edge" development
binaries, start remembering what the -static switch does!  When you have
to upgrade libgtksomething.so to the latest development version, just so
that the latest Evolution snapshot can display an about box ;) or
whatever, the fact that it may, at some point, save you 240k of disk space
next time you install an app which uses that lib, is totally moot.

The app designers have to make a choice, to aid ease of use; obviously,
statically linking GTK+ 1.2.x is a waste of time, but if your app needs
the latest and greatest OpenSSL [1], link it statically for the binary
release.

[1] OpenSSL in particular has been very hairy recently; witness KDE 2.2's
inclusion of *3* versions of the OpenSSL shared libs. :(  WTF!!

--j.