Quote:
Originally Posted by devafree
This relates to the question in hand, because I would like to learn, if and when a distro drifts away from allowing upstream software to be vanilla, or is unable to upgrade to the latest upstream version, could the reason be, in some way, related to automated dependency resolution management?
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I think you've hit the nail on the head. One of the things that made me drift away from Debian was the complexity of their packaging system, I mean the packages themselves, not just the way they were installed. I could see the rationale of separating runtime libraries from their build environments, because lots of people don't want to build their own software. Also, in the age of dial-up, it made sense to reduce the size of downloads. But even the binaries were sliced and diced in a way that made no sense to me. I see now, partly as a result of this thread, that this was to relieve dependency problems by separating the interfaces between libraries from the libraries themselves, and sometimes separating particular libraries from their packages if other software happened to require them too.
It seems you can't use vanilla packages and have a fully-featured dependency system like Debian's.
