Why SuSE 9.0 vs. 9.1?

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Jul 30, 2004, Fairlight wrote:
>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.

I can run a perl::Tk client on the SuSE 9.1 system, and have it display
properly on the X server on my SuSE 9.0 desktop.  I can run the same script
on the SuSE 9.1 system in a an xterm in a kde session on its own desktop.

To make things more interesting, this appears to be related to openssh, and
running using X11 forwarding.  The ones that work on the SuSE 9.1 desktop
are in xterms opened via the kde toolbar, but don't run when run under ssh:

	xterm -e ssh localhost &

Running under the same ssh/xterm, other X clients like xeyes work.

>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.

These problems generally disappear when using the OpenPKG.org packages.
First off, perl, and most of the perl modules I use are built from SRPMS
maintained by the OpenPKG team so I only have to deal with a few specific
packages to apply local modifications (e.g. modifying the OpenPKG version
of perl to support gdbm and provide shared libraries necessary for
postgresql).  I spent a good bit of time recently going from the OpenPKG
Release 2.0 to Release 2.1, and finally got around to documenting the
changes I make in their distributions here:

	http://www.libertysoft.org/openpkg/

Bill
--
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EDWARD ABBEY (1927-1989)