Quote:
Originally Posted by zrdc28
I am in full agreement with samac on this, I just did a slackbuild for a package that need 2 dependence, I then downloaded the same package with another distro and it included 15 dependencies, they both ran ok but what do I need with all that stuff. That is why I love Slackware!
|
[warning: lengthy musing on dependency resolution]
Well, if you only need the two dependencies because Pat packaged the other 13 with slackware's default install, then you love slackware because pat packs it with a lot of stuff by default. This doesn't seem a great reason to love slackware to me; it's the difference between having something on you system now and taking a few minutes out to automatically download something from official repos.
If you only needed the two dependencies because the other 13 were optional, and the other distribution made the decision to install them without asking you explicitly, then you love slackware for the control and power it gives you in dependency resolution, at the expense of making dependency resolution more tedious. This, if you're happy with the trade-off, does seem like a great reason to love slackware.
If this is the reason, then it's only a limited power--limited only in scope not in subjective importance to slackers. Limited in scope because we only have the power to choose how to resolve some dependencies; the core set of slackware packages have already used a dependency resolution mechanism we're very fond of, yet which is completely out of our control. He's called Pat
He does, however, keep out of our way once the system is up and running, even allowing changes to his initial decisions without any tools complaining, unlike a lot of dependency resolution packages, which try to automatically administrate systems, adding or removing packages, on finding the user wishing to add or remove related and/or dependent packages.
I suspect this automatic administration is seen as nothing but an annoying attempt at removing power from the user to a lot of slackers, and not an informative and potentially wise message and potential action appearing from the dependency resolution tool and ultimately from the distro's developers as with users of other distros.
Anyway, I'm not criticizing your statement. It's just an interesting thought experiment. The argument for against dependency resolution, and what's a good mechanism and what's not, is interesting to me, when it doesn't turn into a flame-fest, that is.
