[CentOS] Centosplus & CentOS Extras, Enlarge your tent , Cuckoo repos

Mon Mar 13 22:52:41 UTC 2006
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

On Monday 13 March 2006 17:27, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 15:26, Lamar Owen wrote:
> > Let me make a minor edit to this well-thought-out paragraph, Les.  The
> > change is from 'distribution' to 'upstream open-source developers who
> > have a NIH attitude and who insist on their required version of any given
> > library as being The Only Acceptable Version'.

> I'm not sure I even care about that. While I'd rather not have
> every app statically link every library, I can afford the disk
> space to have versioned shared libs for everything that really
> needs them.

Can you afford the bandwidth?  Updates are already 2-3GB per year.  I'll say 
again; if Microsoft were to require 2GB per year to stay up-to-date people 
would be up in arms....

> That seems to be more reasonable than to expect 
> Linux developers to accept the definition of interfaces as
> contracts among programmers that aren't supposed to ever
> change.

It's not even interface definitions.  It's whole languages.  It's whole 
libraries; GTK1.2 versus GTK2 or QT3 versus QT4, for instance.  Those are 
setup now to coexist.

> I can live with that. That doesn't explain why I can't have
> an RPM-installed evolution 2.x alongside the stock Centos 3.x
> version.

To do this you need to keep all dependencies of all programs that you wish to 
do this with.  I would think there aren't enough packagers in the typical 
distribution's shop to handle that many packages.

Also, the upstream has to respect the multiple version capability.  Things 
like, oh, maildirs need to be intelligently addressed and not blindly 
upconverted.

> Respecting existing interfaces in existing libraries during
> new development would pretty much eliminate the need to keep
> old versions around, but I don't see much hope for that.  A better
> workaround to let multiple versions of everything co-exist is
> probably the best we might see.

Multiple versions of everything....good thing disks are getting bigger...

That is probably the best we'll see.  But we also have to come to grip with 
the idea that there is no ideal Linux distribution; not just for all users, 
but even for all programs.
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu