Squeak as Linux and other threads

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Wed May 14 11:56:12 UTC 2003


Jecel Assumpcao Jr <jecel at merlintec.com> wrote:
> 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.

The parts that are richer don't seem to be what you are talking about,
though.  I'm sure that if you used DEB's from different distributions,
then you'd have the same versioning madness that happens with RPM's.


> > 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.

Yeah, that's what I was figuring.  But, umm, isn't the user being a
little optimistic in these cases to pull in these different RPM's?  Put
another way, does anyone have any trouble if they stick to the actual
RedHat-created RPM's?


> > 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.

I don't get this at all.  If we could agree on what the name+version's
were, then that would be the end of it.  The problem seems to be that
different distributions label the same code with different versions or
even different names.  Adding an extra lookup table doesn't seem to help
this fundamental problem.

I guess you are talking about building a sort of virtual distribution,
where there is a top-level distribution uses packages from multiple
other distributions?  That doesn't seem very practical to me.  In the
Linux world, good distributions do a lot of little tweaks to the
packages to make them work together nicely.  Why should it be different
in the Squeak world?

If there is a better way to handle dependencies then let's do it, but
name+version seems to be a fine way to go.

And at any rate, as you say forks are a long way off -- mostly everyone
is happy with SqueakMap right now.

Lex



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