Dependency hell redux

[Rob Walker]

>>>>> On Thu, 14 Jun 2001 16:17:00 -0500, grib@linuxdevel.com (Bill
>>>>> Gribble) said:

<selective snipping below>

Bill> Gnucash 1.6 requires Gnome 1.4.  
Bill> Guile 1.3 is fine

Bill> I think dave will be uploading a gnucash-1.6.0 RPM that uses
Bill> guile-1.4 today, but the old one will stay too.

>> I wouldn't mind having a sand-boxed version of all the libraries
>> required for GnuCash, but no such set of GnuCash-sandbox RPMs
>> exist.

Bill> We have discussed the possiblity of doing this for a CD release.

Bill> However, for downloaded binary packages, I think we should
Bill> support a reasonable spectrum of standard install targets and
Bill> after that make it clear that you're on your own.

bummer for some.

Bill> Instructions for compiling from source should be more tutorial
Bill> than they are now, and it should be more clear exactly what
Bill> versions of what stuff you'll have to install, but there are
Bill> only so many combinations we can deal with.

Kind of true, kind of not.  I have an example to follow with.

Bill> I hope you understand that by putting such restrictions on what
Bill> you will upgrade you take your system out of the space of normal
Bill> user cases that we want to be able to address out of the box
Bill> with downloadable RPMs.

What about a downloadable .tar.gz file which is all n Megs of
libraries and gnucash and whatnot, and the user is told to "cd ~ &&
tar -zxvf <filename>".  That would create a ~/gnucash-app directory, 
which would have a ~/gnucash-app/bin/gnucash binary, which would
optionally prepend ~/gnucash-app/lib to the library path, and then run
~/gnucash-app/bin/gnucash.real.

The reason the prepend is optional is because you could simply make
~/gnucash-app/bin/gnucash be completely statically linked.

I think that this option would take care of all combinations, as long
as they had enough swap.  :-)

Either way, tons of disclaimers about memory and disk use would be
needed.

have fun,
rob