Package problem

[David Cournapeau]

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 2:35 PM, David Lyon <david.lyon at preisshare.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 19 May 2009 13:53:18 +0900, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> Given that nobody has managed to solve this problem, I doubt you will
>> find a solution.
>
> It is solved in other languages.. for example perl.. and delphi

I don't know much about perl, and even less about delphi, but I am
pretty sure it does not solve the problem of overwriting files from a
package with an installation outside the control of the package
manager.

There is no simple solution to the following situation:
   - install setuptools from ubuntu -> files get into /usr
(/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages, etc...)
   - install setuptools from sources into /usr: overwrite files from
the python-setuptools debian package, with an updated version which is
not compatible with the packaged one -> every Ubuntu package depending
on setuptools is now broken. Worse, it may not be possible to rollback
to a working situation.

To make it work, you would have to somehow notify the package
management system about the updated version. But still, the whole
value of a package manager is to have a whole set of packages which
are tested together. Updating packages 'randomly' from 3rd party
sources is inherently against this.

> Fight it ??? I didn't even get a python interpreter with my operating
> system...
>
> So there's no possible way I can be against it...

By fighting, I meant that because OS don't always have uptodate
packages you want to depend on, trying to implement a system to update
the packages is backward. The problem is depending on those recent
libraries in the first place if you want to run on many
configurations.

cheers,

David