On Fri, Jun 10, 2005 at 08:59:54AM +0200, Harald Hoyer wrote: > Let me show you what "could" be done for the desktop user, who cannot > read terminal output, as he does not use a terminal: > > A small helper app listens on the user's session DBUS for such a message > and presents a gui dialog to the user stating: "Application foo needs > the library bar to run.". It can offer the user to search the rpmdb and > the internet repos for this file and, if found, to install the > appropriate rpm package with all its dependencies. Some friendly soul could also start packaging these and putting them in a yum repo :-) Probably not in the charter of extras, though. You definately don't want to make all this old stuff compile on gcc4, you'll go mad doing that, but some kind of "Works/doesn't conflict with anything in FC4" badge for the rpms would still be nice to have. Easiest way is probably doing nosrc.rpm's what contain some old RH7.3/9/whatnot era library rpm as the source, then extract only the library bits and don't include the conflicting bits that aren't necessary for running apps. With a pointer to the original source, of course. Acceptable trade-off, as one will only need this to run old proprietary crap anyway :-). (Or with FC5 open source code that nobody has fixed to work with NPTL *cough* vdr *cough*) But yea, there's definately a need for a collection of compatibility libraries. The other day I had to run something with a gtk-- 1.2 dependancy. Freshrpms had a rpm for RH9, which worked just fine with FC4 (the software I wanted to run didn't do anything useful, as I had wished, tho :-( ) At some point it's just easier to run an ancient distro in a sandbox making sure it's totally isolated from the outside world so updates aren't that critical. -- Pekka Pietikainen -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
