sane dependencies -- a positive look at 'fix your packages'

[Alan Cox]

> So, in other words I would depend on arbitrary sites to supply prebuilt
> libraries rather than getting software from trusted community
> repositories? Would those prebuilt libraries be of the same poor quality

Actually if the binary is supplied signed by the trusted community source
its origin isnt actually too important. Did it come froma mirror, did
it come from your ISP web cache - was it in fact several round robin sites.
The truth is you already don't know.

> Isn't that what Fedora Extras tries to target? The chance for the
> community to package the popular stuff and maintain it as long as
> their is enough interest in it?

Yes, and to provide a place to find good stuff versus the sea of junk
that you get with arbitary indexes.

> channel and neglects the source code level. Oh, and don't dare to
> report a bug to the author when you run a different distribution. 

The inability to define the precise system state is a big issue for business
or industrial uses. 'zero install' itself doesn't impress me, its a 
special case subset of a distributed caching network file system like 
AFS or DAV. Life really starts to get fun when you have a companywide
caching fs and your boot up looks something like

	Set up cache
	dhcp
	network setup
	mount companwide fs
	chroot companywidefs
	exec init

At that point its a lot more powerful