[TAG] Distro survey

[Benjamin A. Okopnik]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2005 at 06:24:55PM -0500, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> 
> And *that's* the True Name of Dependency Hell, which is the point many
> miss (but Rick didn't) when talking about it:
> 
> It's when upgrading package B to support a newer version of package A
> *breaks* package C.

Agreed, in spades. Although it's usually package *[Cc]*.

> Given the library naming conventions of most Linux boxen these days,
> it's pretty tough to run into it there, unless what you're upgrading is
> the library infrastructure *itself*, but the other big place you'll
> find it is the occasional backwards-incompatibility with things like
> language interpreters (perl, Python, etc).  You can get into a
> situation where those things need to be maintained in several
> versions... and the resultant idiocy in CPAN and Python and PHP's
> analogues thereto can be pretty messy as well.

Just for the record: I've never experienced this. It could be because I
avoid installing packages manually and use the CPAN module instead, but
that's only due to my irrational desire to avoid the above-mentioned
version of Gehenna.

One caveat: when CPAN tells you that a module is uninstallable due to a
necessary system library upgrade (e.g., 'libxml' or something similar),
go look for another module. This being CPAN, there's _always_ another
module. :)


* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://linuxgazette.net *