Re: RPM's are bad

[Dennis Bjorklund <dennisb cs chalmers se>]

On Fri, 20 Oct 2000 jgotts linuxsavvy com wrote:

> >A harder problems is that we would like to have packages that can be
> >installed with different versions in the same time. I have gnome-print
> >0.20 installed and I have other packages that needs
> >/usr/lib/libgnomeprint.so.6. So now I cant upgrade to gnome-print-0.24 and
> >therefore I cant use newer programs that needs 0.24.
> 
> This is an unavoidable problem.  When API's change, bumping library version
> numbers is the right thing to do.  Distributions sort this out for you.

Sure, but shouldn't we try to create packages that you can choose to keep
installed so that old programs still works. For some packages people have
created new rpm's that allow that. For example there is gtk+10 packages
for those who have installed gtk+ version 1.2. And I guess that when gtk+
version 2.0 comes someone will create gtk+12 packages. Why not create
packages that we can keep in the first place.

If we look at gtk+ as an example we se that there is even more
problems. The gtk+10 package does not contain the locale files. Then are
named for example /usr/share/locale/sv/LC_MESSAGES/gtk+.mo. I guess that
old programs that still uses gtk+1.0 will use the new .po files which
might not be a good idea..

So how can we have several versions of gtk+ installed? We should probably
include the major version number in the path there.

Then we also have themes which probably should be solved in the same way,
but one problem at a time. But these problems have to be solved by the
programmer, not only the one who packages it.

I feel that for core libraries, that many other programs use, we really
need to be able to have many versions installed (including translations).

/Dennis