Installing "stuff"

[H.E. Pennypacker]

clash and Mateo are right on, but of course, only a few people pay attention to what they're saying. I wish more people were like clash, Mateo, and I/and me (can't remember which one is proper). Hmm...maybe in a few years we'll gather enough steam to put out of business all those who want to keep Linux where it is today.

We're a minority today, but hopefully that will change.

Clash has been rebuked already, and I hope he can put up with it. At least he knew what he was going to get. Fortunately, I don't care about being attacked on the Internet.

Mateo, preach, my friend. You are right on, and don't let the majority get to you.

[H.E. Pennypacker]

Making debs is ridiculously difficult.

Tell me about it. You know how long it took me to create my first deb? Several hours. I guess there's some humor in it, but in the end, it is not funny. I want to encourage the use of debs, and the deb creation process is enough to deter me from my worthwhile efforts.

The guides are about twenty pages long, and require the use of a billion documents. You have to open this, and then open that, and you have to do some of the work using the terminal (if I remember correctly - see, you can't even memorize the process, because there are too many steps).

I run across software all the time that's not in the repositories

You can say that again. This happens to me all the time. For example, the repo version of ndiswrapper was acting up, and apparently there is a bug in it. Someone told me compile the latest version (available from the ndiswrapper website), and sure enough, he was right. The latest version solved the bug, it seems, and it was not available in the repos.

That's simply not true.

Yup. Many things are not updated in a few weeks. It has been a few weeks, and the latest and most stable version of ndiswrapper has not been added to the repos, as an example. I wonder why, because the latest version is necessary for many of us (probably not all of us).

[ssam]

i would never support the repo people because they won't add software to the repos except when there is a new release of ubuntu.

thats part of the ubuntu policy that is inherited from debian. it is not held to religiously, there have been a small number of exceptions. see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates

there is the backports repository
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuBackports

you can make your own personal backports quite simply with prevu

if you strongly disagree with the stable release policy then ubuntu may not be the distribution for you. maybe you would prefer a dristo that had rolling updates all the time. i know gentoo and debain testing and unstable do this, there are probably more.

[prizrak]

clash and Mateo are right on, but of course, only a few people pay attention to what they're saying. I wish more people were like clash, Mateo, and I/and me (can't remember which one is proper). Hmm...maybe in a few years we'll gather enough steam to put out of business all those who want to keep Linux where it is today.

We're a minority today, but hopefully that will change.

Clash has been rebuked already, and I hope he can put up with it. At least he knew what he was going to get. Fortunately, I don't care about being attacked on the Internet.

Mateo, preach, my friend. You are right on, and don't let the majority get to you.

You seem to equate Ubuntu with Linux which is simply not true. Ubuntu does it this way, Gentoo does it another way. RedHat does it a third way so I really don't see what the problem is.

[Lord Illidan]

What about .autopackage?

[pmj]

if you strongly disagree with the stable release policy then ubuntu may not be the distribution for you. maybe you would prefer a dristo that had rolling updates all the time. i know gentoo and debain testing and unstable do this, there are probably more.

Why should he look elsewhere? We are comparing Ubuntu to Windows here, and there is to my knowledge no distribution in existence that does what Windows does; namely, to have a stable base (the operating system) with software on top of that of any version you desire. It's MUCH easier to stay up to date with all your favorite applications on Windows than on Linux (no matter the distro), and you don't have to run a beta quality operating system to do it either.

Of course there's no easy answer to how to achieve this, but it is a problem that must be solved. Saying that anyone that wants a specific version of a program will know how to install it on their own is not only shifting the responsibility in an unfair way, it's in most cases false. I doubt 99% of the people on this forum have the skills required to, say, upgrade gstreamer, something that is required if you want to watch certain files with it as a huge bug was fixed only last week. Yeah, have fun waiting 6 months for that one.

[forrestcupp]

Cinelerra is in an awkward phase... Too good to be simple and usable for the home user, too bad to be fully functional and competent for the professional. So I don't mind it not being in the repositories yet.

Yeah, and every other video editing option is too pitiful and featureless to use. So what do I do? I use Cinelerra.

[bonzodog]

If you want a distro that has a more up to date rolling repo, try Arch Linux.

However, Arch shys away from the GUI method of installing things,as sometimes the latest versions require building manually, so Arch has an automated package builder that runs off the command line.

The simple truth of it is, there is FAR too much software out there for linux to package everything and keep it up to date. All Linux software is released as source then it's up to each individual distro to package and maintain it.

Clash's idea is closer to the way Mac OSX works - all dependent libs are in the one package. That way, the prog just runs from it's source dir, and installs entirely in one directory alone. In some ways this does make sense, however, Linux cannot use it as Apple have managed to patent the idea.

Even windows has dependency hell - some progs do rely on dll's that are in the root tree, and occasionally, you will find yourself not installing one program but installing two or three, as the dll's are not with the package, and not necessarily installed on the windows system.

The other reason this works so well on mac is because it's just one platform, and most progs go through Apples hands for packaging, so they can make sure all software works out of the box.

Linux however is very spread out, and the nature of open source means that no one program author is going to package it himself.

Clashes Idea would require that ALL distros started using the same package manager and format, which is never going to happen due to the three core parent distros using very different trees and ways of doing things.

At the core of this, it comes down to the fact that after the Linux kernel was released, 3 different people came up with different ways to attach to the GNU toolset to it, and thus was born the 3 Core "Parent" distros - they are Debian, Slackware, and Redhat.

The battles of the Slackware and Debian Communities can be traced back to the earliest days of Linux. Redhat Just went and sat in a proverbial corner, didn't get involved and quietly developed their own thing. They developed RPM (Redhat Package Manager), Debian developed the entire idea of using repos using APT with deb files, and Patrick Volkerding at Slackware decided that vanilla unpatched software was the true path, and kept the .tgz format for binary packages as well as source code packages.

In My opinion, to sum up, the current repo system is the best we can hope for, but there needs to be a community repo where people who build their own packages can upload to, and thus provide much more upto date versions of packages when requested. Zenwalk Linux has this system in place, a community repo, which is maintained by a couple of people who test everything before letting it out into the wild.

[Mateo]

Thank you for aknowledging that a problem exists bonzodog, something most of the people here were unwilling to do (because of fanboyism).

I think getdeb is a good service, but the Ubuntu people should be the people who are sending the packages to them. If they insist of their fundamentalist approach (which is not user-friendly) with the repos, then they should be putting heavy resources into helping projects like getdeb.

I'd like to see a list of all of the new software added to feisty. Anyone have a list?

[prizrak]

Why should he look elsewhere? We are comparing Ubuntu to Windows here, and there is to my knowledge no distribution in existence that does what Windows does; namely, to have a stable base (the operating system) with software on top of that of any version you desire. It's MUCH easier to stay up to date with all your favorite applications on Windows than on Linux (no matter the distro), and you don't have to run a beta quality operating system to do it either.

Of course there's no easy answer to how to achieve this, but it is a problem that must be solved. Saying that anyone that wants a specific version of a program will know how to install it on their own is not only shifting the responsibility in an unfair way, it's in most cases false. I doubt 99% of the people on this forum have the skills required to, say, upgrade gstreamer, something that is required if you want to watch certain files with it as a huge bug was fixed only last week. Yeah, have fun waiting 6 months for that one.

For one the word Linux has been used quite extensively as opposed to Ubuntu. For two rolling up a package is the software distributor's responsibility not distro maintainers'. I have installed NetBeans + JDK pack numerous times and it was always flawless. It would go into the /opt directory with all the stuff it needs. Quite a few projects maintain repositories with their software making it extremely simple to not only install but also keep up with your favorite programs. If whoever made the software doesn't feel like providing a working .deb that is really their problem. Ubuntu is LSB certified it's easy enough to make sure the dependancies are met.

Since you mentioned Windows. In Windows pretty much all programs come with all of their dependancies save for the most basic ones. This is why the software tends to be much bigger than Linux alternatives. This was in response to .dll hell in 95 and 98. Shared libraries is a much better idea of course but if the ISV wants to make sure their software works they can include all the libraries in the package and have it install them all just for that program's use to not break existing dependancies.

You are also bitching about it without really doing any research. For one developers aren't here they won't read it. For two the LSB project aims to provide a common base for all Linux distro's to remedy the "problem" you are talking about. In fact the LSB specs even called for an LSB package manager but it never really caught on.

Whether it's a problem or not is debatable but it is not up to Linux distro's to deal with. I find it interesting that when an installer doesn't work on Windows people complain about the retard who couldn't get the installer correctly but when it comes to Linux it's the end of the world all of a sudden and Linux needs to deal with it ASAP.