Is Ubuntu safe to try

[Dick Davies]

* Stephen R Laniel <steve at laniels.org> [0733 06:33]:

> Users should never have to worry about dependencies. This is
> the job of the package manager, and I should never know
> that, say, libc6 needs to be upgraded, but that upgrading
> libc6 is going to break other packages.

True enough, but there's nothing in OSXs .dmg spec (or Whatever.app,
more precisely) that helps with dependencies - either the README says
'install libfoo first' or libfoo is bundled with the application.

As far as OSX goes, 'the package manager' == 'the user'. Software update
makes no attempt to monitor 3rd party apps, and gives users a false sense
of security. This is one area where even RPM is an improvement on OSX/windows.

> Here's a totally off-the-cuff idea whose consequences I
> freely admit I've not thought much about: how about if every
> package contained all its dependencies? So instead of
> downloading firefox, then libxml2, then etc., I just
> download one big file that contains all of these? Then I
> apt-get install it or whatever (preferably do something
> graphical instead), and all the necessary files go under
> /packages/firefox? When it comes time to remove Firefox, I
> delete just that directory, and I'm done. Yes, there'd be
> some (maybe quite a lot of) redundancy: lots of copies of
> libc6 laying around.

Libc6 depends closely on the kernel. It's not something you want
to give a custom copy of to each app.
Although some of the 'each app has its own library' issues are addressed 
in netbsds pkgviews framework, have a google.

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