Dependency hell redux

[Dave Peticolas]

On 13 Jun 2001 22:11:22 -0700, Dan Kegel wrote:
> lwn mentions that GnuCash depends on 60 (!) other libraries.
> Is that figure correct?  It seems pretty high.

I think the 60 number is rather misleading. It is simply
the line count of the output of 'ldd' which lists all the
shared library files that the gnucash binary is linked to.

However, one distinct shared library file does not always
correspond to one distinct package. For example, the guppi
package creates *8* shared library files, all of which are
linked to gnucash. Installing the single guppi package
gives you all 8 of those dependencies.


> The chances of, say, Red Hat 7.2 actually getting the right
> versions of that many libraries seem pretty slim offhand.

RPM's may not be as sophisticated as deb's, but I think you
should give Redhat some credit :)

It's important to remember the distinction between library
version and package version. Library versions change much
more slowly than package versions and there are usually
many different package versions that provide the same
library version. It's not like you need a particular
minor release of every package in Gnome-1.4 :)

The basic 'high-level' requirements of gnucash are:

Gnome-1.4
Guile
Guppi
g-wrap
db

Gnome-1.4 has lots of packages, but redhat managed to
package gnome-1.2, I don't see why they won't be able
to do the same for 1.4. Redhat, along with every other
major distribution, has been packaging guile & db forever.

So that leaves g-wrap (trivial), Guppi, and GnuCash itself.

Furthermore, RedHat has included GnuCash packages in their
'powertools' distribution for some time and I don't see any
reason why they would stop (except maybe to put it in the
main distribution cause it's so cool :)

dave