From: F J Franklin (F.J.Franklin@sheffield.ac.uk)
Date: Fri Nov 08 2002 - 15:04:24 EST
On 8 Nov 2002, Rob Woodard wrote:
> This is an example of where Linux applications aren't quite ready for
> prime time...all this playing around with cryptically-named libraries
> that are never where the docs say they should be, installation programs
> that insist you don't have a library when the blasted thing is RIGHT
> THERE in /usr/lib...
I sympathize completely, but I think you are being slightly unfair to
linux and open source generally.
The problems you are experiencing are typical of mixing binary releases
from different sources. If you were to use official Mandrake 8.2 RPMs all
the time for all your applications then these problems wouldn't arise...
and similarly for Mandrake 9, or RedHat 8, or debian unstable, or...
The distributors have the job of making sure everything matches.
Unfortunately, distributions go out of date and rather than completely
installing a new distribution it seems easier to pull binary packages from
other sources - but that's dangerous, because there's really no reason why
distributions should play nicely with each other.
The better distributions these days have an auto-update feature. If you
wish to avoid version conflicts then it is wisest to use this feature and
to make sure any foreign libraries/applications don't install in /usr
I have to say that I haven't ever had any problems compiling AbiWord on
Mandrake 8.1, except for the well-known "-lXi not found" problem.
When you understand the nature of the beast...
Frank
Francis James Franklin
F.J.Franklin@shef.ac.uk
`Medium atomic weights are available: Gold, Lead, Copper, Jet, Diamond,
Radium, Sapphire, Silver and Steel.
`Sapphire and Steel have been assigned...'
-----------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to
abiword-user-request@abisource.com with the word
unsubscribe in the message body.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Fri Nov 08 2002 - 15:13:57 EST