Re: Making prerequisites easy

[Todd Graham Lewis <tlewis mindspring net>]

On Wed, 14 Oct 1998, Elliot Lee wrote:

> Does anyone have ideas for making it easier to get GNOME installed, and
> making the prerequisites look less threatening to new users?

Yes; specify them to your hearts' content and then rely on the
distributions to make it all work.  This is very easy to do at the
distribution level and very hard to do at the developer level.

Debian, Redhat, and FreeBSD, all three have very good mechanisms for
ensuring that package dependencies are fulfilled.  Both the Redhat and
Debian mechanisms are cross-platform, too.

This would be easier, methinks, if .deb and .rpm, along with /usr/ports,
were top-level build targets, where one could do a "make rpm" and get
a pile of rpms out the other side.

To reiterate: 

	1) I don't think that programmers should be at all bashful about
	introducing dependencies, and

	2) I think that dependencies should be handled at the distribution
	level.

	3) I wish that we supported distributions more directly in GNOME.

Are patches to make packages support .rpm and .deb as top-level make
targets welcome?

--
Todd Graham Lewis            32°49'N,83°36'W          (800) 719-4664, x2804
******Linux******         MindSpring Enterprises      tlewis@mindspring.net