Packaging and installation

[Erik Troan]

On Tue, 24 Oct 2000, Matt Taggart wrote:

> How? If an application needs a particular library will it search the whole 
> filesystem for the .so? Or maybe just the library path? Will it be able to 
> determine library versions? By just looking at the name or actually looking at 
> the symbols etc? What happens if a user has a half installed version of a 
> library package built from a buggy CVS snapshot. Will that meet the dependency 
> and allow the application to install?
> 

Libraries are reasonably easy as they do contain symbols. Testing to see
if you have a new enough build of apache is much more difficult; the filesystem
simply does not contain that kind of information. Trying to cruft together
a packaging design which gets everything from the filesystem is bound to
fail. There is a good reason dpkg, rpm and their predecessors use a separate
database to store this information.

Erik

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