ARTICLE - ESR gives up on Fedora

[Jason Stephenson]

Nigel Stewart wrote:

> Without disagreeing with your points about how open source is
> "supposed to work", I think doing better repo quality control
> would be a good direction for things to go.  There doesn't seem
> much point in letting a repo get into a inconsistent state and
> letting that flow downstream....

Yes, you are also correct. I should have put a smiley at the end of my 
remark as my tongue was in my cheek at that point. If you're going to be 
dealing with binary packaging, some sort of automatic checking should be 
in order.

With RPM, it shouldn't be too difficult, as you can query an RPM for its 
dependencies. If you find a package that isn't in the repository, then 
the package with the bad dependency should be flagged and disabled until 
the dependency issue is resolved.

In the specific case that ESR is whinging about, the packager apparently 
had a different version of a library installed when he/she built the 
package. That sort of thing has happened to me in the past, so I 
switched to installing from code, even though I mostly use ports these 
days. (Kind of like packages for source code.)

I find it somewhat ironic that ESR is complaining so loudly about 
*binary* package dependencies and that he's "threatening" to switch 
distros over it. You'd think someone with ESR's credentials and attitude 
would be running his own, homebrew distro. ;-) (Ha ha! Only serious.)