Dependency hell redux

[Bill Gribble]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2001 at 07:34:27AM -0600, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> That's fewer than 60 packages, of course, but the number of libraries is
> correct. 

Jon, I have a bone to pick with you.

As a Gnucash developer, I felt like the LWN article was pretty much a
blindside slam.  You didn't come to us for comment before publishing
the article -- which I would have thought was standard journalism
practice, not to mention common courtesy -- nor did you make any
attempts through the normal gnucash support channels (such as this
mailing list, which you are not a member of but clearly monitor) to
fix your problem before publishing an article about it.

Furthermore, throwing around the "60 libraries" number is sort of
edging past the realm of "selective reality" and into FUD.

Yes, I know that that's what ldd gnucash | wc -l returns, but let's
get real.  You say yourself in the quote above that it's not requiring
60 software packages to be installed -- more like 4 or 5, and the vast
majority of those libraries are from standard GNOME-1.4.  The points
you seem to be hammering into the reader are "doesn't this seem
unlikely to work?  doesn't this seem brittle?  don't you think there's
a chance it could trash your system?".  Those lines could be lifted
from the Microsoft playbook, I'm sorry to say.

The impression I got was that you tried to install gnucash, got
frustrated, and then wrote a front-page article in a major Linux
publication while you were frustrated and under deadline without doing
the background work you should have done for such an article.  You
wrapped it up in some language about how you weren't just talking
about gnucash and so on, but you didn't mention a single example of
another piece of software that your criticisms might apply to.

Like Nautilus (which has a "library number" of 52, not including any
of the daemons, CORBA components, Mozilla, or other helper programs)
or Evolution (which I can't even install on my Debian system at this
time because its library dependencies are self-contradictory).

Since you were having problems as your deadline approached, I would
have thought it more appropriate merely to include our press release
in this issue of LWN (which, BTW, it doesn't appear that you did, even
in the section devoted to press releases about free software
projects).  Then, when you were able to get past your initial
problems, you could write an article that might well be critical about
the install process or dependencies but at least had the potential of
being balanced, because you can say more about the program than just
making a snide comment about not being able to get it to work.

Hopefully you will have the time to fix your installation problems
with Gnucash and write such an article for a future issue of LWN.  I
would be happy to help in any way that I can.

Thanks,
Bill Gribble
Linux Developers Group, Inc.