Dependency hell

[Jza]

I want to ask the forum what exactly you mean by dependency hell. AFAIk both deb's and rpm have dependency issues when you deal with non-standard mirrors.

I see many people use apt, but I have used urpmi for several years before apt was out there and on both levels I did find dependency issues when I used the bleeding edge apps.

[Tsuroerusu]

I want to ask the forum what exactly you mean by dependency hell. AFAIk both deb's and rpm have dependency issues when you deal with non-standard mirrors.

I see many people use apt, but I have used urpmi for several years before apt was out there and on both levels I did find dependency issues when I used the bleeding edge apps.

You know DLL hell on Windows? Where one DLL is linked against a particular version of another and that one is ........ that is basicly it for Linux.

[snarkout]

I completely agree - there is nothing inherent about either packaging system that makes it more prone to dep issues. I have no idea where all that particular trash talk comes from. I can, however, give you a good example of what dep hell is:

Try installing streamdvd, dvd:rip, and and acidrip w/o yum or apt-get. Thi is a fun one which is IMO caused completely by streamdvd. Streamdvd at this point, "provides" lsdvd, which is to say that if you grab streamdvd and compile it/install it, you end up with lsdvd (.9-something IIRC) on your system. The current version of acidrip doesn't include, but does depend on lsdvd to do its thing correctly (so does dvd::rip). IIRC, the most recent version of lsdvd is something like .15, and acidrip expects this version. Streamdvd doesn't want a later version than it comes with, especially since it provides a patched version.

So, in essence, because of the way these two apps behave, you cannot install both on a system and not expect breakage, if you can install them side by side at all. Acidrip *may* work just fine with the earlier version of lsdvd - I hope it would since the same person wrote both pieces of software - dvd::rip simply does not, though. The current version of dvd::rip will not list chapters if you don't have the correct version of lsdvd.

A total Charlie Foxtrot.

[Gomer_X]

Even when these problems arise, they can often be solved by installing multiple versions of libraries. Fedora has compat-* packages available for some things to solve these problems.

As far as "dependency hell" goes, you don't have that problem with a dependency resolver. RPM just installs things, you need something like yum or up2date or apt-get to automatically install your dependencies.

On Fedora there is a problem with different package repositories using different naming schemes that occasionally will cause an incorrect or incompatible package to be installed. If you only use "official" repositories or choose repos that are known to cooperate ,though, you don't have any problems.

As with many things, the system works if you use it as intended, but you can break it if you try hard.

[dann]

Dependency Hell used to be a lot worse, but they've made strides in correcting these issues. I recall back around RedHat 6 or 7 where rpm was upgraded to 4.0. There were some packages that you'd try to install which would complain about needing rpm 4.0. But if you tried to upgrade to 4.0 it wanted other dependencies to be in place first. These dependencies wanted rpm 4.0 first. It was a cyclic hell.

When you stray outside the normal package repositories of your distribution you can run into these issues. For instance, using the repositories that supply cinelerra to Ubuntu often require packages that are newer than the ones in the Ubuntu repositories and will often not install the software you want. While you can force the install, it can cause problems down the line with the package management system. So you get in a loop of trying to fulfill the dependencies of the package you want while not breaking existing packages on your system. It all goes to hell when that dependency is something like a newer version of libc.

[Wally Balljacker]

I guess everyone should just run out and install Gentoo right?

[CptnObvious999]

I guess everyone should just run out and install Gentoo right?

You bet Im loving it it uses slots for this type of thing. I have kde 3.4 and 3.5 on the same box which is harder to do on some other distros I think.

[Tsuroerusu]

I guess everyone should just run out and install Gentoo right?

If you like the GCC compiler screensaver and don't like to get anything done, then go ahead and run Gentoo!

[CptnObvious999]

I guess everyone should just run out and install Gentoo right?

If you like the GCC compiler screensaver and don't like to get anything done, then go ahead and run Gentoo!

That must be why its running on NASAs supercomputer The install is what takes a while but just doing system updates it isn't bad at all, I do it everyday. It may take more than a noob one but thats the price I have to pay for getting one of the fastest, most bleeding edge, and most customizable distro around. I for one think the juice is worth the squeeze.

[Tsuroerusu]

I guess everyone should just run out and install Gentoo right?

If you like the GCC compiler screensaver and don't like to get anything done, then go ahead and run Gentoo!

That must be why its running on NASAs supercomputer The install is what takes a while but just doing system updates it isn't bad at all, I do it everyday. It may take more than a noob one but thats the price I have to pay for getting one of the fastest, most bleeding edge, and most customizable distro around. I for one think the juice is worth the squeeze.

LOL, how long do you think it takes to compile KDE on a 10,000 CPU super cluster! 30 secounds man!!!!!!
But that's not a reason for people without big pockets to sit there compiling all day long, I have better things to use my CPU power and RAM for than compiling an update of GCC or shit like that! When there's an update for kdebase I spend 20 seconds updating the thing through YaST, works very well, no burbs no nothing!

[CptnObvious999]

LOL, how long do you think it takes to compile KDE on a 10,000 CPU super cluster! 30 secounds man!!!!!!
But that's not a reason for people without big pockets to sit there compiling all day long, I have better things to use my CPU power and RAM for than compiling an update of GCC or shat like that! When there's an update for kdebase I spend 20 seconds updating the thing through YaST, works very well, no burbs no nothing!

How often does a new KDE come out? You could get the binary if you want. Besides they are different and I don't know why people can't accept that there are good and bad things for everything. I don't have to pay for Gentoo and it is faster. Two reasons why *I* like Gentoo and *I* believe they are more important than speed of installing programs. If you don't think its worth it fine don't use Gentoo. I've learned to accept this however other people have not. My mom still runs Windows I have told her that Linux is better and told her why but she still won't switch, thats fine I respect her decision as long as she is informed I'm happy.

[Tsuroerusu]

How often does a new KDE come out? You could get the binary if you want. Besides they are different and I don't know why people can't accept that there are good and bad things for everything. I don't have to pay for Gentoo and it is faster. Two reasons why *I* like Gentoo and *I* believe they are more important than speed of installing programs. If you don't think its worth it fine don't use Gentoo. I've learned to accept this however other people have not. My mom still runs Windows I have told her that Linux is better and told her why but she still won't switch, thats fine I respect her decision as long as she is informed I'm happy.

Fair enough.
I've been a little down on you, sorry man, you wanna use Gentoo that's cool with me. What I do think Gentoo has done very well is that they can just fetch the w32codecs package from europe through portage, that I'd like to see done in SUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora and Mandriva.

If Gentoo had a packages system like FreeBSD, I would defenitely consider using it, my point is just that I don't want to compile big stuff like OpenOffice and KDE from source, even if I want the latest of them.

GNU/Linux in general is a wonderful thing, it's like scientific colaboration, we all can use this software to learn more, that is similar to using science to learn more. Wonderful stuff man.

[CptnObvious999]

How often does a new KDE come out? You could get the binary if you want. Besides they are different and I don't know why people can't accept that there are good and bad things for everything. I don't have to pay for Gentoo and it is faster. Two reasons why *I* like Gentoo and *I* believe they are more important than speed of installing programs. If you don't think its worth it fine don't use Gentoo. I've learned to accept this however other people have not. My mom still runs Windows I have told her that Linux is better and told her why but she still won't switch, thats fine I respect her decision as long as she is informed I'm happy.

Fair enough.
I've been a little down on you, sorry man, you wanna use Gentoo that's cool with me. What I do think Gentoo has done very well is that they can just fetch the w32codecs package from europe through portage, that I'd like to see done in SUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora and Mandriva.

If Gentoo had a packages system like FreeBSD, I would defenitely consider using it, my point is just that I don't want to compile big stuff like OpenOffice and KDE from source, even if I want the latest of them.

GNU/Linux in general is a wonderful thing, it's like scientific colaboration, we all can use this software to learn more, that is similar to using science to learn more. Wonderful stuff man.

I've said it before and I'll say it again Linux is all about choice. I'm just glad this turn out to a fanboy brawl I've been there before and it isn't pleasant...I must never talk about those day ever again

[Gomer_X]

I guess everyone should just run out and install Gentoo right?

You bet Im loving it it uses slots for this type of thing. I have kde 3.4 and 3.5 on the same box which is harder to do on some other distros I think.

I have a hard time believing Gentoo completely solves dependency problems. There's no reason a portage tree can't be broken, and I'm sure it happens.

I've had multiple version of the same app installed on RPM based systems before. If you want to do it the easy way, just install from source under /usr/local/. If you want to do it the hard way, you can unpack an RPM, change a few details in the spec file, then rebuild the RPM. Not much harder than tweaking flags in Gentoo.

[CptnObvious999]

I guess everyone should just run out and install Gentoo right?

You bet Im loving it it uses slots for this type of thing. I have kde 3.4 and 3.5 on the same box which is harder to do on some other distros I think.

I have a hard time believing Gentoo completely solves dependency problems. There's no reason a portage tree can't be broken, and I'm sure it happens.

I've had multiple version of the same app installed on RPM based systems before. If you want to do it the easy way, just install from source under /usr/local/. If you want to do it the hard way, you can unpack an RPM, change a few details in the spec file, then rebuild the RPM. Not much harder than tweaking flags in Gentoo.

I havn't ever had any dependancy issues. Once in a while the configure will fail and tell me Im missing something so I just emerge it. Portage has been kept very uptodate and has lots of packages so there isn't much of a need for outside repositories so everything comes from one place and you don't get different named packages and breakage everywhere. In Gentoo if a package did conflict I could just edit the ebuild with any text editor and change the SLOT variable to use one number higher, although I havn't needed to do that because the portage maintainers are very good about doing that. I just remember having trouble with this on Ubuntu, Debian, and Kanotix having to uninstall Xorg and KDE. It was a mess.