Re: Discussion about why GNU/Linux system upgrades cause old programs to break

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  > This means a traditional distribution-based Linux installation is not very
  > friendly to people who are developing their own software, building third
  > party software, or trying to run an older version of a packaged
  > application.

This suggests another idea to me: define (for Debian perhaps) a
package called build-gnu-software which depends on various packages
that we think many GNU packages will want.  We can then tell users
that if they want to build GNU packages, they should do apt-get
install build-gnu-software.

One of the packages build-gnu-software would depend on is gtk2.

It is a mistake for distros to consider gtk2 and gtk3 as versions of a
single package.  They do different jobs.  Installing gtk3 says nothing
about whether gtk2 should be installed.  Maybe we can convince
GNU/Linux distros to change the handling of that question,
to treat gtk2 and gtk3 as unrelated packages.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)