Why Yum and Repositories are So Important
One of the main joys of Linux is being able to try out new programs.
Taste, if you will, the latest cutting edge stuff. But the chief bane of this newness is having to walk through the mine-fields known as Dependency Hell.
A recent linux magazine article touted the wonders of Enlightenment 17. Not a Desktop enviromment, but a new breed of file-manager and Desktop Shell.
Sounded good. I decided to try it out. The CVS download was pretty straight forward and downloaded a ton of files in various subdirectories. So far, so good.
Before installing the program, the magazine said, you should compile the Libraries it would need in a particular order. There were 14 plus Libs. Each one in its own directory and each one had an autogen.sh file. Simple enough.
All went well until the 11th library. It was missing something, and would not configure. 3 stinking libraries shy of Enlightenment.
That is why I find YUM and Apt-Get and similar rpm installers so powerful and necessary to the advancement of Linux. It HAS to be that simple.
It was the reason I switched from Open Suse 10.1 to Fedora Core 5, and though still not perfect, I'm staying there until things improve at SUSE.
Wingman out.
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