#pragma comment (lib, ...)

[H. S. Teoh]

On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 08:54:19PM +0200, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2012-10-11 16:23, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> 
> >Yeah, one of the poor design decisions of the early Redhat packaging
> >system was to allow packages to depend on individual files, rather than
> >packages. The result was a disastrous mess: some packages export
> >different versions of the same file, and only a subset of them will
> >work, leading to hair-tearing dependencies. Packages would step over
> >each other's files, causing problems with each other and the rest of the
> >system that depended on the same files, ad nauseum.
> 
> That sounds even worse, a terrible, terrible idea.
[...]

Yeah, it was one of the things that convinced me to *not* use Redhat. I
saw a similar thing back in the Bad Old Days of Win98, Win2k, and their
ilk, where installing a driver would sometimes prompt you something to
the effect of "this driver needs to install a file that already exists;
overwrite the file, delete it, or skip it?" None of those options should
be anything the *user* has to decide, IMO. It essentially amounted to
"flip a coin and pray the OS won't crash, and if you're *really* lucky
the driver might actually work". Things like that convinced me *not* to
use Windows. (I don't know if Windows still does that, as I don't use it
anyore; but for everyone else's sake I would certainly hope it doesn't!)

Of course, IIRC Redhat has since fixed this broken design, but the
horrible memory of it stuck. Debian, OTOH, has a depends-on-package
policy, which results in a much saner system where a package can specify
a dependency on other packages (with an entire package as a unit),
optionally with a version constraint, and thus be ensured that it will
get the correct versions of all related files. That was one of the
things that convinced me to use Debian. :)


T

-- 
This is not a sentence.