Dependencies suck!
I've been running Redhat Linux 9 on one of my dedicated servers (don't ask me why I haven't upgraded). I went through the pain of installing the newest version of kernel, openssl, openssh and apache last week and it seemed to go smoothly. Except I just noticed that Apache SSL stopped working. It was a weird error and debugging the process revealed that Apache was still using the old openssl shared library. Oh well, I thought, I'll just remove the old version of openssl completely and reinstall Apache + point to the new openssl path. I was wrong. After I removed old openssl many things stopped working such as su, perl, wget, lynx and much more. I had to move the old shared libraries back to where they were to get things back to normal. There are ways to get this working, but I don't want to recompile all those packages! What a nightmare...
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02/02/2006 - 12:14
Just compile from source and all be fine =)
02/03/2006 - 00:15
[b]Marat K. Phattakhoff[/b]: Recompiling everything from source is not a good option in RedHat, considering how it’s built. Again, RedHat was not my choice – it was the only Linux OS that was offered by my provider at the time. Compiling from source is a good idea and I would definitely go for it if I had something like Gentoo or Slackware. And even then, if I compiled wget with openssl support, it would use the current provided libraries. Upgrading to a newer version would make me recompile wget anyway. I guess what I’m trying to say is that Linux overall has a lot of dependencies and once one dependency is removed or upgraded, you end up with a bunch of non-working programs.
02/05/2006 - 01:10
They should re-write “make” with better tracking and housekeeping features. Look at Windows Installer and “Add/Remove programs” applet of MSFT. It’s near perfect!
RPM provides a solution too, but not everything is available in RPM, and even if it were, some people prefer “make” for various reasons.
03/24/2006 - 18:31
Dependencies are not better solved in other Distris …
take a look at the glibc-Howto, which I wrote after I tried to upgrade a Suse 6.3 with a new Glibc.
Many things would work much better if the distribution would keept to standard file locations and not placing everything where they like …
04/17/2006 - 09:08
dude why didt you upgrade that redhat :S