Re: Install instructions?

["Jesse D . Sightler" <jsight mindspring com>]

On Sat, 10 Apr 1999 13:32:21 Brandon S. Allbery wrote:
> In message <19990410131402.B12946@vorlon.babylon>, "Jesse D . Sightler" writes:
> +-----
> | The old gtk 1.0 apps won't work with gtk 1.2 because of changes in the newer 
> | version
> | of gtk.  RPM does a lousy job of handling library versioning, so they hack ar
> | ound
> | it by including old versions with weird names like "gtk10-1.0".  Sick, but ef
> | fective.
> +--->8
> 
> You can get it to work if you "rpm -i" instead of "rpm -U" (at least, it
> looked like that worked last time I tried it), but then you get into other
> problems: mainly with confused sysadmins when two versions of a package are
> simultaneously installed, but probably also with e.g. the RH system upgrade
> procedure.

Exactly, "rpm -i" ought to be the right way to do it, but still causes problems due to
weaknesses in RPM.

RPM should have some way of checking dependencies more strongly.  For example, instead of
just knowing that Gimp 1.0 requires GTK 1.0 or greater, it ought to know that it requires
a binary compatible version of gtk 1.0 or greater.  Since shared libraries only change major
version number when binary compatibility is broken, this ought to be possible.

Instead, we get chaotic hacks and workarounds.

---------------
Jesse D. Sightler
http://www3.pair.com/jsight/

"An honest answer can get you into a lot of trouble." 
         - Anonymous