Stephen John Smoogen wrote: > On Dec 6, 2007 12:51 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: >> Stephen John Smoogen wrote: >> >>>> The point is that as an end user, I want a sensible way to deal with >>>> multiple repositories that _don't_ collaborate. After all, if everyone >>>> agreed on policies we wouldn't need any third party repositories at all. >>> Ok the problem field is that you have N different repositories, using >>> M different guidelines, using O different compile flags, and P >>> different filesystem layouts. >> The constraint is simply that you do not replace any file/library with >> one that is incompatible. > > And how do you know it isnt compatible? Keeping ABI's the same is > extremely hard work and basically would mean that a repository rarely > puts up new stuff but only backports items from upstream. Thats a lot > of work for something they don't get paid for. And even if the ABI is > the same, it doesnt mean that you have different actions occur because > one had a compiler with XYZ flag in it and the other had XZY. > >> The Sun people like to claim that you can run >> anything that ever ran on Solaris on subsequent versions so the problem >> space isn't as impossible as you make it seem - it is more a matter of >> respecting interfaces and backwards compatibility. > > And that was a load of bull from Solaris. You could run most Sun > things from Solaris 2.x to 2.x1 but the list of things that didn't run > as expected was always pretty long. And to do that they had to > basically strip down the OS to extremely limited functionality. That > was why it was such a 'radical' change when they started shipping GNU > tools in the OS because it had been requested for years but the amount > of churn was too high for them to want to deal with. > >> But my point is that >> I don't want to be forced to use a repository that always follows this >> constraint. Sometimes compatibility is what you want, sometimes you >> want something different, and you need to be able to manage both. >> > > But are you willing to pay for that? Because its not an easy problem > to solve that people can throw more computers at and get it working. > It usually requires a lot of meat-ware time with people working out > meat-ware politics and issues. > >>> The best you could possibly do is not >>> have packages at all but keep each package in a dmg file and let the >>> ld fight it out over who gets executed today... but that would seem to >>> be a different OS. >> Yes, that would make Linux as difficult to maintain as a Mac. >> > > Maintainability is usually on the opposite side of choices. > > > guys, while somewhat relevant - this list is really not the place for this conversation. As has happened before its going to go round in circles with lots of noise - but no action. -- Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/ : 2522219 at icq