TuxPaint woes

[Albert Cahalan]

Michael Stone writes:

> On the other hand, it would be rather trivial for activities which
> cared to check their dependencies in a adhoc fashion (by running
> rpm themselves if they wish) and by reporting errors if necessary
> dependencies are unsatisfied.

This is far from trivial. Sure, I could do it, assuming the RPM
database not made unavailable via security restrictions.

First I need a wrapper, or I need to load my libraries with dlopen.
Otherwise, my program simply won't start. Upon discovering the
failure, I need to report it. This seems to require graphics, but
it may well be the graphics library that is missing. I suppose it
is OK to assume Xlib is installed (so, no need to speak X11) and
of course the C library, but... ouch.

There is a better way. Every *.xo could have something in it to
say what it needed. For example, a *.spec file. This file could
be read by some other activity. Call it PackageManager. :-)