Multilib Middle-Ground

[James Antill]

On Thu, 2008-05-01 at 22:54 +0200, Denis Leroy wrote:
> Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > Les Mikesell wrote:
> >> Paul Howarth 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). 

 If they shipped all of their own dependencies then their rpm would just
work if you installed it ... given that they have been brought up, in
this thread, as a "problem that we should try and work around" I'd say
their current "strategy" is not working.
 If they want to continue down this path of providing no deps. in their
rpm, that's fine but then _they_ need to make it work, and _we_ (Fedora)
have no way to fix it for them. Adding gratuitous hacks isn't going to
help anyone.

> 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...

 Being about the 3rd or 4th person to try and tell people this in this
thread, but the _automatic_ dependencies don't work that way they _are
the same across distributions_.
 Yes, to do it "as well as Fedora" atm. they might want/need package
versions too ... which might mean they'd need to build per. distro. but
they'd certainly fix the multilib problem, and probably the vast
majority of other cases, if they just _didn't manually delete_ the
automatic deps.

>  There's simply no easy way to distribute 
> closed-source softare for Linux, as we all know.

 That's funny, because adobe seem to be doing a pretty good job of
it ... at least it's a better solution than anything else I've seen for
any other OS.
 But even if it was "hard", it'd still be _much easier_ for the vendors
to fix their packaging than for us (Fedora) to guess at what all of
their users want/need and to add hacks to try and please everyone.

-- 
James Antill <james at fedoraproject.com>
Fedora