ARTICLE - ESR gives up on Fedora

[Kjel Anderson]

I don't love the style of ESR's comments, but I think that maybe some folks
on the list are missing his point. I believe he is trying to express that as
long as installing software has anything to do with how "rusty your cs
skills are", adoption of Linux for regular users is going to continue to be
low. I realize that not everyone thinks this is a bad thing. Also, why have
package management if we are just going to justify it's failures by telling
users that they should be installing from source? Please don't get me wrong.
The email to those various lists was pretty obnoxious.

Kjel

On 2/25/07, Jason Stephenson <jason at sigio.com> wrote:
>
> 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.)
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