[plug] re opening linuxconf

[Beau Kuiper]

On Sun, 6 May 2001, Christian wrote:

> On Sun, May 06, 2001 at 02:21:26PM +0800, Beau Kuiper wrote:
> > > >From memory, this is a few years ago, it was the upgrade from lib5 to lib6.
> >
> > No wonder
> >
> > libc5 to libc6 is really a new distribution job. all the other libraries
> > depend on libc5 still, so when you attempt to build a new program that
> > uses libraries other than libc, it will try to link to both libc5 and
> > libc6, and it won't work.
> > I imagine a packaging system which attempts to upgrade libc5 to libc6 will
> > fall into the same hole, or have to upgrade every package on the system to
> > link and use libc6, essentually a new distribution.
>
> I know people who have used the same initial install of Debian from (at
> least) 1.3 (libc5) through to 2.0 (and beyond) which is libc6-based
> without any trouble.  Doing that sort of thing by hand is, as you
> suggest, a complete nightmare -- I know some people who did that as
> well.

Well package management is good at that. Since the computer is doing it,
it gets done thourogly and properly. I played around with libc6 on my
libc5 slackware distro, and found the subtle problems, even though inital
installation went well.

>
> There are some situations where installing by hand from source makes a
> lot of sense.  But, for the most part, it makes a lot more sense to rely
> on a well-tested and robust package management scheme.  To do otherwise
> seems, at best, quaintly old-fashioned and, at worst, archaic and
> fool-hardy.

Robust? Please. RPM can't even handle dependancies in a sane way.
when you cancel an apt operation, it leaves its own database in tatters.

Package Management still has a way to go yet.

Beau Kuiper
kuiperba at cs.curtin.edu.au