Multilib Middle-Ground

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Thu May 1 21:39:01 UTC 2008


Denis Leroy wrote:

>>
>>>> Stripping of pathname-based and package-name based dependencies I 
>>>> can understand, but not the library deps.
>>>
>>> Are they the same across all RPM based systems?
>>
>> Yes, they are and the third party packages have no excuse if they are 
>> deliberately disabling the automatic dependency mechanisms.
> 
> It's not that simple. VMware does this for a simple reason: they want a 
> single RPM that works on *all* distros. Essentially it's like static 
> linking (except they don't, they just ship their own dependencies). 
> VMware would otherwise have fairly complex dependencies (gtkmm comes to 
> mind) that would force them to provide probably a different RPM for each 
> <distro,version> pair... There's simply no easy way to distribute 
> closed-source softare for Linux, as we all know.

I'd say that applies equally to open source software too, unless you 
think of building special packages for every distribution and version 
and arranging storage/mirrors/bandwidth for all of those variations as 
being easy.

-- 
    Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com




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