Nepomuk and Akonadi

[Kevin Chadwick]

> > if you wish to block packages which aren't supported  
> 
> What are you talking about ?!
> 
> > or avoid the rediculous dependency problem.  
> 
> What are you talking about ?!

If your on the Arch list I'm surprised you've missed Ralph who works in
pro-audio and so had to avoid pulseaudio, yet again despite Lennarts
claims. He used dummy packages which are not a supported method and was
having real trouble keeping his desktop running on Arch, something to
do with systemd and GDM I think. No AUR method was given to him and he
would be on his own doing something the AUR was not designed for. This
is the same for other Gnome dependencies like polkit which now wants
Javascript because the developers on crack and thinks Javascript is a
universal language.

The seemingly overriding Arch goal as stated many times by their
developers is to be as close to upstream as possible (likely due to
wanting to maximise their limited number of devs effect), hence in some
ways more at upstreams whim than even Ubuntu which has avoided the
latest Nautilus recently, but I agree you have more control keeping your
system how you like on Arch, compared to Ubuntu upgrades.

I used to think the same as you but it's not anywhere near as true as I
thought and the dependency problems in Linux are getting worse and not
better. There was a big push to sort that but it seems to have hit a
wall of non carers.

Gentoo and so Sabayon have USE flags that you can set, if say you want
to avoid things like pulseaudio and polkit and the community is all for
customisation and control to users whim, that is it's primary goal. A
big difference that you must realise if you look into Gentoo.

There is also a distro where they try to build everything statically
and some of the arguments are quite compelling and that should give
great control but I bet there's many packages they simply hit a wall
with.

I'd love a static Konqueror file manager for example, but it would take
a fair amount of work to sort out. Alas even Gentoo and Sabayon can't
sort that one with USE flags.

-- 
_______________________________________________________________________

'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work
together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a
universal interface'

(Doug McIlroy)
_______________________________________________________________________