On Monday 12 May 2003 10:13, Lex Spoon wrote:
> Jecel Assumpcao Jr <jecel at merlintec.com> wrote:
> > But they still use names, which is too weak. Conectiva and Suse
> > might both have a .rpm called guile-1.4...., for example, and yet
> > the first is missing some library files that are present in the
> > second one. So I download gEDA...rpm and all dependencies are
> > satisfied, but it won't compile. And fixing things manually will
> > cause the whole package edifice to come tumbling down.
>
> I'm not convinced.  I'm not sure what makes the difference between
> Debian and Redhat,

The Debian package format has a richer dependency structure than the Red 
Hat format.

> but Debian people manage to download everything
> from standard repositories, where it's relatively straightforward to
> keep everything consistent.

Sure, it hasn't split into multiple distributions even with efforts like 
Corel Linux and others. As long as everything is centralized in SM for 
Squeak we should have the same effect.

Red Hat derived distributions (Mandrake, Conectiva and so on) did split 
causing the problem I explained above.

> Furthermore, if you can't ever agree on
> a name+version scheme between separate repositories, it is hard to
> see how anything else is going to work.

The problem is that the dependency is between files in different 
packages. Having name+version be a proxy for the real dependency graph 
will nearly always work, but sometimes will get you into trouble.

With proper inter-module pointers and universal IDs, you eliminate the 
human factor of reusing a name for slightly different things.

But certainly name+version is more than good enough as a start.

-- Jecel