Re: Making prerequisites easy

[Peter Petrakis <peterpan wn net>]

>1) I think that this sounds great; yet another reason why one out of 
>   every two computers owned by me runs Debian.  8^) 
 I'm planning to try the alpha dist of debian once it's reasleased.
I've heard good things about it :).

>2) I think that this is the responsibility of the distributions.  Attempts 
>   to duplicate their work will not be as good, will interfere with their 
>   plans, and generally will be sucky.  The best we should do within 
>   GNOME is clearly to establish what our dependencies are in each 
>   package's docs, so that maintainers can easily tune their packagings. 

The super package idea should be aimed at just getting gnome-core installed
and if the other packages can depend on the super packages then great. If not
the user will have to install the appropriate libs themselves. Though with all
the things the superpacks provide that wouldn't happen very often.

If desgined properly the RPM package could upgrade or install a package and if
it hit a snag it could disasemble it self into the smaller rpms that make up
the super package and provide an install procedure text. They could be set up
like this.

basepack , contains supplementry launguages like scheme , guile, and gsl...
grahpicspack, contains libjpeg, png , ungif, zlib, imlib, fnlib.... 
languagepack , gtk+ & glib
then gnome-core

What do you think?

Alpha Powered,
Peter Petrakis