Why SuSE 9.0 vs. 9.1?

[Fairlight]

Y'all catch dis heeyah?  Bill Campbell been jivin' 'bout like:
> On Fri, Jul 30, 2004, Fairlight wrote:
> >With neither thought nor caution, Bill Campbell blurted:
> >> On Fri, Jul 30, 2004, Fairlight wrote:
> >> >Simon--er, no...it was Bill Campbell--said:
> >> >> 
> >> >> One problem I've had with the fully updated SuSE 9.1 Professional
> >> >> desktop system here is that perl::Tk X-clients on other systems
> >> >> fail to display on the SuSE 9.1 X server, failing with:
> >> >
> >> >Ouch!  Oh, that's nasty.  If I thought it was actually pTk's fault, I might
> >> >post it to the pTk group but it sounds like a specific X11 bug.
> >> 
> >> The same perl::Tk scripts work OK running on the 9.1 system, and have been
> >> running for years on other systems here including a variety of Linux
> >> distributions, FreeBSD, and SCO OpenServer.
> >
> >Did you mean 9.0 there?  I assume so, but you know what they say...
> 
> No, the perl::Tk scripts work on the SuSE 9.1 system when run from an xterm
> under kde.

I saved as much attribution as was present here because I'm confused.  It
seemed you were saying perl/Tk programs were -not- running under 9.1, and
yet you just said they do in the message I'm replying to.

Can you clarify?

> I have never done Red Hat beyond installing many of their distributions in
> a test environment.  I've read too many horror stories of library
> incompatibilities, not to mention looking at the internals of many RPM
> .spec files from RH.

Libraries...not so bad except for one case where they released something
and never released its dependency.  :)

The .spec files...oh boy.  That's when I started seeing how scary RH really
is, when I started having to pry them apart.  I mean, you want the system
and dependancies to match precisely as possible if something depends on
something else, so using their configuration is the surest and easiest way
to do that.  So I'd rip one apart for like PHP 4.1.2-7.3.6 and just rip the
actual source out, dump in 4.3.4 (the latest when I did it), and massage it
to get it to build correctly.  But their .spec files -were- a nightmare.

> I know that the perl::Tk module from CPAN has some extensive testing when
> one does a ``make test'', but it's been years since I built that manually.
> I'm using the OpenPKG perl packages which are very good about maintaining
> consistency between their perl package and the installed modules.

I built it manually a few times this year.  Yeah, it has a lot of testing.
:)  I don't mind the core of perl being in an rpm, but I don't like the
modules coming in rpm's, really.  Suddenly you need to update something
(like CGI.pm) for security reasons, and then your rpm won't pass a --verify
anymore unless you rebuild the -entire- package from the .spec upwards.  I
find module rpm's (and the way RH split the perl package in particular) to
be highly annoying.

I could use some clarification on the Tk vs SuSE 9.1 situation though.  I'm
now wholly confused as to whether it works or doesn't work. :)

mark->
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