Desktop apps

[Derek Martin]

On Thu, Mar 04, 2004 at 09:26:48AM -0500, Brian Chabot wrote:
> How about a nice, universal package manager? Not Alien, but something 
> more userfriendly.   Something that will automatically figure out 
> recursive layers of dependencies, search all kinds of archives for them, 
> and do it all automagically (with just user confirmation...)

I meant to also make the point that this is not really a problem with
Linux desktop apps per se...  It's more a cross-platform compatability
issue.  Red Hat, Debian, and other distributions have great tools for
managing software installs -- on their own platforms.

Sometimes, we must remember that, even though we use the term
"Linux" to refer generally to any Linux distribution, Red Hat !=
Debian != Mandrake != Gentoo etc.

That is, even though these operating environments all use a lot of the
same software, they are all seperate and distinct operating
environments.  Just as you would not expect software packaged for
Itanium HP-UX to work on Itanium Solaris, you must not and should not
expect software packaged for Red Hat 7.1 to work without problems on
PLD Linux 1.0.  They are both "Linux" in broad terms, but they are
very, very different operating environments.  As it should be.

Does this point in any way help solve the problem of making Linux
software easy to install?  Well, no.  But when people ask for a
universal package manager, I think they're trying to solve the wrong
problem.

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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