Re: Dependency hell *again*

On Sun, 2005-07-24 at 15:13 -0400, Bear Tooth wrote:
> On Sun, 24 Jul 2005, Crispin Flowerday wrote:
> 
> > Your point being ? Would you rather we re-implemented an entire 
> > HTML rendering engine ? Galeon requires mozilla installed (it can 
> > be built against firefox as well), and that dependency is not 
> > something that is likely to change.
> 
>         Nor is it the problem. I do keep mozilla installed and 
> updated. I've done so for years, even though I don't use mozilla -- 
> and said so on this list a few days ago.
> 
>         I have no idea whether galeon/mozilla, or rh/fc, or the 
> repositories for them, or something else, is causing trouble; but 
> the trouble exists, and has arisen in the last few days.
> 

Bear tooth, you don't specify the dependency issues you speak about, but
at some point they have to tackled if you want to continue enjoying
galeon :-(  

I'll say it here loud and clear: galeon is perhaps the most "fragile"
app I have on my system, so perhaps it will always be problematic to
users - who knows?  

For example, I have found that upgrades to mozilla (via yum) or
installation and/or removal of random apps can _break_ galeon by way of
it losing sight of shared libraries.  After the last round of breakage
(just got galeon back functioning again yesterday) I found that I had to
do the full <configure><make><make install> as superuser to actually
allow it to happen due to some new permissions thingy.  Only a week
before the rebuild was done in the usual way, that is doing <make
install> only as superuser.  

That's twice in one week that galeon broke - caused by different things.
In all the cases that galeon has broken or refused to build it has been
because of shared libraries - gtk-based, as far as I can remember.  I've
always just gritted my teeth, solved dependencies and/or pointed
<configure> to the correct libraries - whatever was needed to rebuild it
from source to get it back again.  Once everything is in place a rebuild
is easy enough.

Why build it from source?  Because, I gave up trying to get binaries
from yum or apt repos, because the only ones that carried galeon screwed
up my FC3 system in too many other ways.  No, building it from source
each time is not at all hard - just wish I didn't have to do it so damn
often!! ;-)  Once you have some dependencies satisfied the first time
it's easy after that :-)

_All that above is NOT a moan to the developers_, that's by way of
saying to you as a user that if you "wants yer galeon, yer going to have
to eat sh1t from time to time to get it - and keep it" :-)

Gavin.



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