It’s Alway Fun to Blunder in Front of Your Peers
Several people, possibly hundreds of people, got to see the following statement while doing a routine system update on their computers over the last few days:
Some requested packages cannot be installed:
amarok-1.4.5-9.SoS.2007.1.i586 (due to unsatisfied libgg.so.0)
amarok-engine-xine-1.4.5-9.SoS.2007.1.i586 (due to unsatisfied amarok[==
1:1.4.5-9.SoS.2007.1])
amarok-scripts-1.4.5-9.SoS.2007.1.i586 (due to unsatisfied
libamarok0-scripts[== 1:1.4.5-9.SoS.2007.1])
libamarok0-1.4.5-9.SoS.2007.1.i586 (due to unsatisfied amarok[==
1:1.4.5-9.SoS.2007.1])
libamarok0-scripts-1.4.5-9.SoS.2007.1.i586 (due to unsatisfied amarok[==
1:1.4.5-9.SoS.2007.1])
Isn’t that pretty? I did that.
Amarok is a really cool and very popular music player / mp3tag / lyrics finder / band biograpy / album cover downloader / … there are a lot of slashes. It’s a wonderful application.
Well, I decided to package the newest version to work with the Mandriva Linux operating system. To put it in M$ Windows terms, shortly after everyone upgraded from win98 to XP I took winamp from Vista alpha and backported it to work on XP. More or less.
Hey, It worked great for me and several, perhaps hundreds of other people. The people that is, who upgraded their computers from the older distro (read win98 to XP). The people who did a fresh install from a clean harddrive however, didn’t have the proper libraries lingering on their computers to make it work.
Of course I sent my packages off to the package repository on a Friday night, just before leaving for a weekend camping trip. I didn’t get around to checking my e-mail until Monday evening.
Fun.
Luckily for me, the people in the Mandriva community are a pretty understanding bunch of folks. The problem was pointed out to me and I had the packages removed from the repository as soon as I found there was no easy fix. Most comments were along the lines of “it happens” and even “thanks for trying”. I still felt like I had toilet paper stuck to my shoe but I appreciate the Mandriva, linux, and open source community even more now than ever before.
I’m currently doing a fresh install on the computer I will be building all my packages on from now on. I’ll be testing on that box and this. I also have a couple of people who have generously volunteered their computers as guinea pigs for future packages which I need tested.
You live, you learn, you go on.