Question on slapt-get and Salix repos

[Akuna]

What makes you think I'm "so upset"?.. I am simply quite amazed... & more so as your posts get more voluminous.

[jwhendy]

What makes you think I'm "so upset"?..

That was kind of not very nice...

Tsk... tsk...

Hmm...

Well, I'm getting cross-referenced and reprimanded for reasons I can't quite figure out... that's why.

I am simply quite amazed... & more so as your posts get more voluminous.

Amazed by a post. Incredible. I usually reserve that emotion for things actually deserving of it. Voluminous explanations are required for those who seem to require them by their puzzled states and amazement.

I've held steady at my initial thoughts about Salix, pkg management, and slapt-get; I've posted consistent summaries about those thoughts; I've not sought to hide anything from anyone, clearly pointing to the posts themselves so others can read them for themselves and form their own judgements... and out of the blue I get a 'tsk tsk' for who knows what on a 3 month dead thread. What kind of response were you expecting? 'Oh, I'm so apologetic, Akuna. Thank you so much for pointing out my horrid forum etiquette and slanted representation?'

I think not; since I disagree with the accusation, I can hardly present anything but a discussion of the facts and an encouragement to get them right.

[JRD]

-- Why am I considered crazy or slanderous for pointing this out? Salix is the group who proposed to improve Slackware with dep info... not me! I simply asked why it could not be used for both installation and removal and the reasons I got did not seem logically consistent...

Sorry to make it short but the answer is really simple :
Salix want to improve Slackware, right, but by keeping the KISS principle. Adding dependancies IS quite simple.
Finding orphans (the really orphans) and reverse-dependancies is a N-P-complete problem. Search the web, if you don't believe me. So this IS NOT simple, and Salix is not interrested in such a thing.

[jwhendy]

Thanks! That was a wonderful answer. Though I don't understand all the reasons why it is not simple, I will accept that far more readily than some of the other proposals. My primary difficulty with this thread was that the primary reason given for not allowing automatic dependency removal had to do with a philosophy (not letting the user break his system) rather than a limitation in creating this functionality (as you point out).

If this is, indeed, the reason then I'm happy to hear it.

Contrary to what others may think of the above. I have not ruled Salix out as an alternative and actually found 13.0.2 quite a bit more pleasing in my recent test drive than when I first picked it up. I love that it's Slack-based so I know where things are and how to get around as well as the fact that it allows 64bit. I'm disappointed that Zenwalk has not followed a similar suit and posted about such things in their forums.

Thanks for the clarification.

John

[Akuna]

Voluminous explanations are required for those who seem to require them by their puzzled states and amazement.

What you initially wrote was quite enough:

1) Re. my comments on the ZW forums.
-- I re-read things and agree that my recent post may have come across as a bit harsh compared to the actual discussion. I retract some of what was said.

All the rest was superfluous. No need to try to get you point across again & again, we got it the first time & already responded.

Contrary to what others may think of the above. I have not ruled Salix out as an alternative

Lucky we...

[jwhendy]

All the rest was superfluous.

Not really. Read it and you will find content that I believe can serve Salix, other distros, and other users well. Regardless of whether anything will be done to make these changes, the point is that they could provide useful tools for your users.

In the end, I actually recant that I need to retract anything.

Since you stated all your question were answered, and you quite profusely thanked Shador for helping you out with his script, that is actually why the conversation ended up here.

This is the entire basis for your thinking I did something wrong. After thinking about this to see if I did anything wrong, I come to the conclusion that I have not. Not receiving any further posts about my suggestions regarding Salix's philosophy left a bad taste in my mouth about the whole matter and made me wonder why.

The truth is that were JRD to have come around during the initial discussion and provide the helpful comment that he did below (which explained things far more satisfactorily to me), none of this discussion would be occurring in the first place.

Instead I'm being tsk-tsked for no reason and then condemned for defending myself... so figure.


John

[Shador]

This is the entire basis for your thinking I did something wrong. After thinking about this to see if I did anything wrong, I come to the conclusion that I have not. Not receiving any further posts about my suggestions regarding Salix's philosophy left a bad taste in my mouth about the whole matter and made me wonder why.

The why is quite simple to answer. It's not really uncommon for (floss) discussions to suddenly turn dead though unfinished. Usually it's because there's nobody who wants to/ can answer (at the moment) and then finally its forgotten. I experienced this myself sometimes and one easily starts to wonder why the others are so ignorant. But as I pointed out it's just a matter of postponing for whatever reason (e.g. no time, project freeze for a release, ...) and finally forgetting.
Some effective "countermeasure" are:

• ask again (twice, thrice, ...)
• ask differently (sometimes information is missing or the question wasn't well understood, search for possible problematic points), but still stay short (long posts easily shock potential readers)
• eventually ask why there's no response, possibly even addressing single persons directly. You know like when there's an emergency people are unlikely to call and ambulance when not directly addressed. BUT keep it as a very last resort as it easily can get annoying.
• possibly other methods I didn't think about