[UCLA-LUG] Upgrading questions . . .

[Mark James Fasheh]

On Wed, May 17, 2000 at 06:48:04PM -0700, Todd A. Lyons wrote:
> It concerns me that a program won't install itself due to an
> "unsupported distro," especially Helix!
Helix is very new, and supports the latest (and almost latest) versions of
many distros.  Mandrake 6.1 is pretty old, (in internet time!), and I'm not
surprised that it's 'unsupported'.  If you ask me, the number of disros
(Debian coming soon!) they support is pretty impressive.
  
> It seems like the program
> should look at dependencies like library versions, support programs,
> etc.  If it won't install because it doesn't recognize the distribution,
> then it sounds awfully non-useful.  Don't they realize that many of us
> manually upgrade programs and libraries?  
If you do that, then you don't need to run the installer.  Simply download
the RPMS and install.  There is nothing preventing you from doing that. 
What helixcode is trying to do is support the Linux newbies, and those users
who just want to get their work done, not the gurus who manually configure
their systems.


> And that many of us (maybe
> only some?) actually prefer tarballs over pre-packaged binaries of any
> sort?
Tarballs of all gnome software can be downloaded at ftp.gnome.org. 
additioanlly you can cvs (my prefferred way :) the software.  Instructions
are on developer.gnome.org.  BTW: if you like tarballs, you probably ought
to run something like slackware, which will not get in your way.  Package
management is in place for a good reason.  When you bypass it, you lose many
of it's benefits.

BTW:  I used to be a hardcore tarball fanatic.  then I learned how to use
RPM.  Take the time to learn it -- it really is far superior to manually
upgrading stuff (in the ./configure;make;make install; sense).  I almost
always compile my own stuff, which then gets put into RPMS.  It's not that
bad...
	--Mark
	
--------------
If we were meant to get up early, God would have created us with alarm clocks.

President, UCLA LUG
Mark James Fasheh <mfasheh@linux.ucla.edu>
http://www.exothermic.org