Malcolm and the team do a good job in sorting out and advising on problems, I am back with openSuse having been using this product now for many years and it is the distribution of choice for me.
What I still find within the distributions are available pages for installation with missing dependencies, the problem is that a lot of developers and distributors have a wide range of support libraries available on the development machines which allows these packages to run seamlessly. however within a distribution context when from the main websites are downloaded and updated have some of these libraries missing.
For example we have recently started with OS 13.2 and need a flash replacement - a choice could be gnash, we have used before with 12x and 11x, and I do not recall a problem in installing. However it not possible to install with in the context of distribution 13.2 because a library is missing.
the general recourse is locate the dependency with maybe pbone.net and install that and continue with the installation
I recall previously there was an issue with mixed conditions of oss using non-oss together in the same downloads but there were workaround which were clearly signposted.
Outside of the rush to bring the new versions into service could the developers not insure the dependencies are included within the overall final distribution?
Maybe a volunteer task for someone who is not a coder *** developer but a regular user who can have and installed distribution and ensure each of the programs have the libraries in the distribution - and if not post it for an action to get it included in the nearest distribution update.
Maybe move to the top the call for volunteers.
Chris Gidden
Hi Chris
Now I have to respond since you mentioned me by name, but must say it’s the openSUSE team/Contibutors etc not me…
Do you really need flash? Setup a test box and perhaps a list of sites that don’t work and why. I do note that a lot of websites moving to jw player video codec h.264 but audio via (patent encumbered) mpeg4-acc, so requires a gstreammer (bad?) plugin.
A lot of improvements in building rpms has been done using pkgconfig leading to better requires being automatically generated, there are still the outliers though, but when found, a bug report (or if inclined, branch fix and submit the package) is by far the easiest way to get something corrected.