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

[Andy Hanton]

On Sat, 2003-10-04 at 13:20, Michael Schwendt wrote:
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> On Sat, 04 Oct 2003 11:51:34 -0400, Sean Middleditch wrote:
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> > Given the autopackage project, RPMs and their (possible) problems may in
> > the future just be relegated to low-level system stuff, which is another
> > solution, but one not yet ready.
> 
> This one?  http://autopackage.org/faq.html  Doesn't look promising
> in the middle of the FAQ.

They aren't the only ones working on this stuff.  The zero-install
project (http://zero-install.sf.net/) seems to be trying for a more
interesting solution.  They actually link software to libraries using a
caching http filesystem.  For example, an application that needs gtk2
would link to /uri/0install/www.gtk.org/gtk2/libgtk-x11-2.0.so. So it
doesn't need the funny hacks autopackage uses to detect what the user
has installed.  The user can double click the application and all the
dependencies are downloaded automatically and doing so never breaks
anything else on the system.  

-- 
Andy Hanton <andyhanton at comcast.net>