Software Installation in GNU/Linux is Still Broken, and a Path to Fixing
Jun 24, 2009, 21:09 (18 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Tony Mobily)
[ Thanks to steve
hill for this link. ]
"Most distributions today (including the great Ubuntu) are based
on package managers. If you want to install a piece of software,
you grab it from one of the official repositories, and your package
manager will 'explode it' onto your computer's file system. A
program will place bits and pieces in /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /etc, and
so on. This is normally done through a package manager. In Ubuntu,
for example, you would probably use Synaptic. A package manager
will normally solve all the 'dependency problems' for you. Ah,
dependencies... basically, an image viewing program might need, for
example, libjpeg to function (libjpeg being a library of functions
to open, save, and generally deal with JPEG files). This is a very
Unix-ish approach. It works perfectly well for servers, but fails
on several levels for clients. Why?"
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