Linux fat/bloated

Marc Lijour marc-bbkyySd1vPWsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org
Thu Apr 6 14:47:00 UTC 2006


On April 5, 2006 02:38 pm, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 05, 2006 at 02:08:42PM -0400, Marc Lijour wrote:
> > 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.
>
> I don't see why.  If exim and postfix conflict, then you can only
> install one of them at a time.  Simple to solve.  Works for me.

You never experienced a failure to install? Somebody talked about dependency 
hell in this thread before. The fact is the current situation is far from 
perfect. Let's take an example with Debian apt which we presented recently.

We have tested Apt’s behavior on a snapshot of the Debian pool taken in the 
middle of 2005, and available in the EDOS subversion repository as 
Data/Sources/Packages-pool.gz. Of the many tests performed, we retain the
following three, which clearly exhibit some of Apt’s limitations.
    • apt-get install abiword-gnome=2.2.7-3 fails
    • apt-get install abiword-gnome=2.2.7-3 abiword-common=2.2.7-3
      succeeds
    • apt-get install abiword-common=2.2.7-3 abiword-gnome=2.2.7-3
      succeeds, but installs one more package!

As you can see apt fails to devise a solution to install abiword though there 
are (first case). Solutions found by apt are also order-dependent	as you can 
see in the later cases.
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