Re: OFT say you have our attention on M$

On Monday, 30 January, Bruce Stephens wrote:
> Darren Salt <news@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
>> FWIW, that happens to work in Lynx, and possibly in other programs, so
>> long as the package is seen to have MIME type
>> application/x-debian-package. The mime-support package has the necessary
>> bits, but since it uses dpkg to install the package, it won't download
>> any packages which are required to fulfil dependencies.
>
> That was my point: wouldn't it be nice if there were some program which
> *could* download dependencies? I know browsers and things will offer to
> use dpkg to install stuff (well, OK, /usr/lib/mime/debian-view); it seems
> an obvious idea to add in APT stuff that would deal with dependencies,
> and maybe offer to get recommended and suggested packages.
>
The problem is that if you get a package from outside the repositories
there's no guarrantee that it will be possible to resolve the dependecies
from within the repositories unless the package was specifically built for
the target distribution, and if it was there's usually no good reason not
to include it in the repositories in the first place.

For example, try installing an Ubuntu deb that contains python modules on
Debian and you'll find that it depends on python => 2.4 and that's not
available from the Debian repos[1], so there's no way to resolve the
dependency. It's perfectly possible to include non-free software in distro
repositories (as Ubuntu's 'multiverse' does with Acrobat Reader etc.) or
as second best to set up third-party repos (as Opera do). There's simply no
technical advantage to being able to install directly from debs (or the
equivalent) on a webpage. There are, however, a good number of
disadvantages, such as loss of package authentication (more a deb problem
than an RPM one) and loss of automatic updatability.

All that said, IIRC yum will attempt to resolve the dependencies of a
non-repo RPM from the repositories if it can, it's just not very useful,
especially given how easy it is to set up a yum repo.

Ewan

[1] Assuming current stable releases in both cases.
.

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