Autopackage for Ubuntu!

[elanthis]

Konstantin Ryabitsev Wrote: 
> 
> 1. You want to install application Foo, which depends on a library
> libbar 1.2. You manage to be lucky and find a .package file for libbar
> version 1.2. If you're not lucky, well, then you must install it via
> some other way, like download-make-install, or apt-get, or whatnot.
> 2. A while later you decide you also want to install an application
> Baz, which also depends on libbar, but on version 2.0. So, you upgrade
> libbar-1.2 to libbar-2.0 and your application Baz installs and works.
> 3. However, your application Foo now no longer works, because it
> requires libbar-1.2, but you forgot all about that. Since autopackage
> doesn't care about other applications already installed, it won't
> check if something breaks during a library upgrade.

This isn't true, in theory.

libbar-2.0 would be paralell installable with libbar-1.2 because they
are two different major versions.  If a package needed libbar-1.4, then
upgrading to 1.4 should not break any apps using libbar-1.2

The only time this isn't true is when libbar is badly broken and
developed incompetently, in which case your only choice with *any*
packaging system is to statically link it... or put up with the fact
that you have two applications that can never, ever be installed at the
same time, until one or the other is modified to use a different version
of the broken library in question.  Which is why libraries are supposed
to use proper versioning, and application authors should simply refuse
to use any libraries that are developed improperly and broken.

I'd still like to get a site setup listing "popular" broken libraries,
and apps that depend on them, so that distributors and packagers know
which apps and libs need to be compiled statically, and application
authors can make informed decisions as to which libraries they should
absolutely avoid when at all possible.  Said site would also contain a
lot of documentation on how to properly develop libraries and why
proper versioning is so vital for both Free Software and non-free
software.


-- 
elanthis