Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Thu 22nd Feb 2007 23:24 UTC, submitted by Andrzej Ptak
There are currently at least five popular ways of installing software in GNU/Linux. None of them are widely accepted throughout the popular distributions. This situation is not a problem for experienced users - they can make decisions for themselves. However, for a newcomer in the GNU/Linux world, installing new software is always pretty confusing. The article tries to sum up some of the recent efforts to fix this problem and examine the possible future of packaging software in GNU/Linux.
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Member since:
2007-01-30
The way I see it, the problem exists on basically two levels: packaging format and run-time environment i.e. libraries (the more difficult one to solve)
The run-time environment problem can't be solved even by compiling software from source. Here is an example: I just tried to compile latest Inkscape (vector graphics app) from source on my RHEL 4 (actually Scientific Linux CERN) machine. The ./configure -script stops with an error:
checking for INKSCAPE... Requested 'gtk+-2.0 >= 2.8.0' but version of GTK+ is 2.4.13
configure: error: Package requirements (gdkmm-2.4 glibmm-2.4 gtkmm-2.4 gtk+-2.0 >= 2.8.0 libxml-2.0 >= 2.6.11 libxslt >= 1.0.15 cairo sigc++-2.0 >= 2.0.11 gthread-2.0 >= 2.0 libpng >= 1.2) were not met:
The new software does not apparently work with RHEL's "obsolete" libraries. This means basically that I would have to install new Gtk (and its dependencies!) from source as well! I actually did this some time ago and it sort of worked but the new Gtk broke some existing RHEL apps.
There is lots of software not available for RHEL (note that I'm NOT talking about Fedora here, there are many more software packages for Fedora than for RHEL). Just some of them are listed below:
- LaTeX beamer (presentation tool, had to install it by hand, but works)
- Auctex (emacs extension)
- new version of Rhythmbox (the version provided with RHEL crashes all the time)
- Inkscape
- OpenInventor (either SGI or Coin3d implementation, Fedora 3 RPMs seem to work)
- Evince
- KPDF (the one for KDE >= 3.4, not the KDE 3.3 version)
- Desktop search tools
What I would like to have is this:
1. More software
2. More up-to-date software (e.g. when new version of some program becomes available I would like to upgrade this particular tool to its latest version)
3. No need to upgrade the entire operating system just to install new end user apps.