Linux fat/bloated

[Marc Lijour]

On April 5, 2006 09:32 am, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 05, 2006 at 11:01:07AM +0300, Peter wrote:
> > Imho Perl is not so bad but I wish they had not obfuscated the manpages
> > ...
> >
> > Anyway shipping a Linux distro with 2,500 applications preinstalled
> > requires four nines for zero bugs. Also the dependency tree is at least
> > three deep for most applications. Unless something will be done about
> > this soon (esp. dependencies) bad things will start happening. A 3-deep
> > dependency tree is not sustainable imho. Maybe partially precompiled
> > libraries can reduce the depth of the dependency tree.
>
> I don't have problems with the dependancy tree on debian.  Depth is not
> an issue.  Correctness is.  If the dependancy list is complete and only
> contains what is needed, then it will simply work, no matter if you end
> up with a 50 level dependancy.
>
> Partially precompiled libraries doesn't make sense, and just sounds like
> a huge mess.
>
> Besides the dependancies are handled entirely by the packaging system,
> all you ahve to do is tell it what packages you want installed and it
> handles everything else for you.

As soon as we have conflict nodes, installability becomes NP-hard.
http://www.edos-project.org/xwiki/bin/Main/Wp2Complexity

And the package management tools are far from perfect. 
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