Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Oh dear.

With some web sites now offering up Slackware build script it is disheartening to see they are including dependency information.

A few years ago an American mate of mine and a bunch of people from another long standing binary only web sites offering slackware compatible packages started to work on improving the information about how slackbuild scripts are done and done properly. After a few weeks it soon became clear they wanted to do more to 'improve' the slackware package management system. One of these 'improvements' was depenancy awareness. My American mate and I dropped out due to this single thing which we could not agree to.

The Slackware author is also opposed to dependency awareness within the SLackware package management system so why on earth are these 3rd party people insisting on adding dependency awareness to their build scripts? Worse. Some of the people offering this crap are now part of the Slackware developement team. Does this mean they are now leaning on the main creator to have this shit part and parcel of the package management system?

What next? Some crap like RPM and apt-get where sources have to be hacked to Hell and back to make them fit in with that distributions layout?

I sincerely hope not. While I cannot see SLackware gaining any more momentum than they have right now I honestly think such a thing would be the final nail in Slackwares coffin. Stop this crap now before it catches on!