Re: Stop hitting yourself!

Floyd L. Davidson schreef:
measekite <inkystinky@xxxxxxx> wrote:
houghi wrote:
measekite wrote:

Package management is great and it would be nice if
Windows had that. But there is a lot of Linux
desireable software that is not included in the
system and also new version that you can only get if
you upgrade your OS (Ubuntu). Gimp is an example. So
for Linux you search all over for dependencies and
maybe even compile everything and then it will
install in folders that you may not even be aware
of. Then you need to find an executable somewhere
(you do not know the name or the extension) and then
search somewhere else for an icon.
That is not my experience. It is possible to do it that way, but many
don't and there almost never is a need to do it so complicated.

That is not correct. Here is a specific example. I am using Feisty
Fawn 7.04 Ubuntu. In the package system it Gimp 2.2.

I want to upgrade to Gimp 2.5. The only way to do that using the
package system is to upgrade the OS to either 7.10 or the current Hardy
Hereon. Some have tried to down load the latest from Gimp and find all
of the dependencies and then compile and install. They have not been
successful.

Then they really should not be fooling with a
development version, thats all. I've compiled GIMP 2.5,
it worked fine.

It's not only a problem with development versions: in my experience it's also far from trivial to install GIMP 2.4 if your distribution is somewhat older.

Regardless, lets see you compile PhotoShop on a Windows
box. Never mind compiling the lastest bleeding edge
development version that Adobe is working on!

I do like Linux, but I too see this as a shortcoming of the package management systems (or the distributions). If you want a newer version of some application than your distribution offers (or if want some software that your distribution doesn't have), there are only a few options:

- Use a 3rd party package or a backported package. Only possible if such a package exists.
- Compile it yourself. In my view that's not something that an end-user should be expected to do. Compiling in itself is not that bad, but it's often not easy to install or compile all needed dependencies.
- Install a binary with static libraries, like Opera offers (or offered -- I haven't checked lately). Easy, but only possible if such a package exists; most software I encounter is not available this way.

In the Windows world, I don't encounter those problems. Maybe that's just because developers adapt themselves to Windows' non-existent package management system and include all their dependencies in every installer, but the result is that I can install almost all modern software on an old Windows 2000 system (except MS' own software, but that's another story). Installing Firefox 3 on Windows 2000 is just a matter of downloading it and pressing a few buttons; try that with a Debian from that era.

Another problem IMO with the current state of package management in Linux is that each and every distribution has to do work to package each piece of software. That's a lot of duplicated effort.

Cheers,
Roel

--
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge
faster than society gathers wisdom.
-- Isaac Asimov

Roel Schroeven
.