[RULE] APT, YUM or URPMI on RULE, was: Mini-KDE

[Liam Proven]

M. Fioretti wrote:

> ...if you just do this with the standard repositories on an old
> computer you are toast: the hard drive will be filled up in one
> nanosecond by unneeded or generally bloated stuff, from locales for
> all the languages you'll never speak to plugins for every database
> known to man...

Ah, yes, OK, good point.

I have not yet put this to the test, but I think that this is a weakness 
of the way that RPMs are built. APT-RPM uses information that's already 
in RPM packages to work out which ones it needs to get, but RPMs aren't 
built with that in mind, so often, APT needs to install a big RPM 
containing lots of stuff to get one supporting library that happens to 
be in there.

For example, on my system, running SuSE Pro 9.1, upgrading my video 
player resulted in the installation of a new kernel, an MP3 player - my 
third - and installing PalmPilot synchronisation tools, though I do not 
own a Palm and do not wish to. (I'm a Psion user.) I presume it needed 
all these because these packages happened to contain libraries or 
something that the video player needed.

I theorise - not tested it yet - that on Debian, where packages are 
built with this behaviour in mind - that you get lots of little DEBs 
with just one library in, so that dependencies can be satisfied without 
installing loads of unnecessary clutter. I am looking into this.

The way around it /might/ be to create lots and lots of little RPMs 
which contain a whole selection of important libraries, just one per 
RPM. Then APT-RPM can install just them and not the bigger ones. It's a 
lot of work, though, but arguably worth it; once you've used APT, you 
never want to go back. It's not perfect, but it works amazingly well, 
and dependency problems become a thing of the past 95% of the time.

> That's why I came up with the mini-kde
> thing: try to figure out how to make an rpm set with less
> dependencies.

I understand now. Good plan, under the circumstances.

-- 
Liam Proven
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