When stability is pointless

[Joel Goguen]

On Tue, 2008-11-04 at 22:22 -0500, Michael Haney wrote:
<snip>
> The same should apply to applications which must be installed via
> alternative methods like the "make install" compile method.
I'm not sure how realistic this is without something to say "hey, keep
track of me".  You can't just track everything installed anywhere
whenever the user types "make install" either, because some users may
not want that in all cases.  If you really want to keep track of this,
something along the lines of checkinstall[1] might do for tracking
what's installed with "make install", but including dependencies is not
likely trivial.  For example, I recently compiled Assult Cube for
64-bit, and it required me to install the development packages (which
themselves install the libraries) for SDL, SDL-image, and SDL-mixer.  I
may only require SDL-mixer for Assult Cube but perhaps I require
SDL-image for 3 other things and SDL for an additional 2 other things.
You would need to tell whatever you're using to track your "make
install" changes what other libraries this depends on.  That would be
very error-prone, especially if I forget that I installed a package and
remove everything else that depends on it.  Suddenly I have something
broken and I may or may not know how to check why. 

I'm not saying I disagree with the idea of tracking what's installed
through "make install", I'm just saying that I don't think it's as easy
as I think you're making it sound.  Also that the user should be able to
choose for each "make install" whether to track it or not.

[1] http://freshmeat.net/projects/checkinstall/ 

> -- 
> Michael "TheZorch" Haney
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> 
-- 
Joel Goguen
Bug-free code is a myth.
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