Ok, how bout SuSE 9.0?

[Bill Vermillion]

On Mon, May 24, 2004 at 02:14:19PM -0400, Jay R. Ashworth thus spoke:
> On Mon, May 24, 2004 at 12:44:05PM -0400, Bill Vermillion wrote:
> > > That's not the fault of RPM, that's the fault of package
> > > dependancies in general. Take anything that relies on OpenSSL
> > > for instance, and you work up the chain of dependancies. Yes,
> > > you have to satisfy the RPM's dependancy list, but it has one
> > > to prevent you from doing something stupid like putting in a
> > > library that won't have a symbol that something needs.

> > Then why not change those installs to work like a typical pkg_inst
> > with binaries, so that it will automatically find the correct
> > dependancies and install them.  At least the ones I ran across in
> > Linux [and I'm no Linux expert] required me to go fetch what was
> > needed.  The computers are smart and fast enough that they should
> > do some of this work :-)

> Yeah, Bill; it's called apt-rpm.

> Or yum.

Mark hadn't mentioned those and I'd not heard of them. I've heard
of apt-get though which given that name can I assume it is part of
an apt* family as pkg* is?

> > That WAS a problem in FreeBSD.  And that was because so many of
> > the install scripts were Perl and Perl version dependant.  So
> > all the install scripts were re-written to use on shell of c
> > programs.  

> Well, *that's* overkill...

Not to their way of thinking, and it also meant that the OS was not
dependant on a 3rd party application.  A 'minimal' version - base
OS and many /usr things will fit in 200MB - and not having Perl
required to install that helps keep it down.  That means you can
build slim dedicated routeres and firewalls in a minimum of
space.

> > The additional reason was that Perl has grown so large they didn't
> > want to have that as part of the Base OS that they keep slim so
> > that it can be used in standalone systems that don't need all the
> > fluff.  Now you can install the one distributed or the newer
> > version [ which goes into /usr/local ] and a 'use-perl' [I think I
> > have that right, lets you set the version you wish to use at that
> > time.

> Then you make an install-perl that's stripped and tiny, and use that.

Part of the problem was default installs required the 5.005_03 and
since this were going to have to be re-written to work with the
newer version - they decided to make the move to keep everything
using sources over which they had complete control.

This way the end users could run any version of Perl they wanted.

Their reasons given sounded good.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com