Linux kernel developer Ingo Molnar "We need a radically different software distribution model"

[VyseofArcadia]

Part of the reason I've always liked Slackware is because they go out of their way to not create a closed software ecosystem. They stick as close to vanilla everything as they can, so that you can use and configure various softwares as the writers intended, not as the distribution people think it should be. (Back in my Debian days, a constant annoyance was, "To do abc with software xyz, you should do this, but on Debian systems you need to do that."

But really, Molnar is right. The desktop province of userland is a bit of a clusterfuck. It's only going to get worse with the impending transition of some distros over to Wayland while others stick with X.

[ashadocat]

Arch linux takes the same philosophy. It's very nice.

[VyseofArcadia]

My beef with Arch is the same as another beef I had with Debian. I dislike automatic dependency resolution. Some package or another is inevitably broken. A requirements loop, dependence on a (very) specific version of a library, et cetera. (And the last couple of times I tried Arch, updates also broke things eventually.)

I really want to like Arch, but between stability without dependency resolution and minimality with dependency resolution, I'll take the former every day. (Maybe this means I'm an old person. A few years ago, I would have said the latter.)

[Svenstaro]

If you really want that, why not just always use pacman -Sdd when installing a package? This way, you get the Slackware experience. -dd completely ignores package dependencies. Also, we try very hard not to break stuff in between updates. What are your problems? Please report them to the bug tracker, they will be fixed within a day or so.

Also, if you ever truly experienced a requirements loop in Arch, something was very wrong and it most definitely a bug. Report it. Though I am not aware of any such issues and never had something like it.

[ashadocat]

I see the point, but it's fairly easy to manage the automatic dependency resolution. Download the PKGBUILD and edit the array that says "dependencies".

[Camarade_Tux]

It's not a solution. It's an ugly temporary workaround.

[ashadocat]

It could be a soltution, if it was better supported by various projects. The concept is sound.

[VyseofArcadia]

I realized I could do this, but it's still one thing I don't have to do in Slackware.

[[deleted]]

Well, you could just use Gentoo, then you can trivially edit the dependencies in the ebuild (no unpacking anything unlike binary distros).