Package Manglement
Recently xchat 2.6.0 was released. I waited a few days, mainly as I forgot about it, but finally had enough with xchat 2.4.x crashing on DCC send and sometimes on receive as well. There is a Fedora Core package, and source is available as well. There are links to other sites that have packages for other distributions.
The site for the Mandrake, well Mandriva now package, only has stuff for the most recent release. Nothing for those who are not keeping up with the bleeding edge. So it looked like compiling was what was needed. The instructions were simple... the actions, not so much. A consistent failure from GTK+ not being found, then not being new enough. Chances are upgrading GTK+ will cause a "dependency cascade"... and so that is where I stopped.
Looking through xchat's forums, someone made a Slackware package and I installed that on caspian where it's been running for several hours. And unlike 2.4.x it can DCC even after several hours of uptime. On another page I found suggestion of how to install a Slackware package on a non-Slackware system. It only almost works, dagnabbit. The bad part of that is that I then lost the working (though buggy) xchat. Removing it and re-installing older version ran smack into more dependency problems. It's starting to remind me of Windows and that should not be happening. Meanwhile I'm discovering just how screwy KSirc is. It's a backup, not a primary program by any means.
I resumed my search for a Mandrake package of xchat 2.6.0 and I actually found one. But it came with its own dependency cascade. It didn't look too bad, only two packages needed, but the first needed something else. That something I can find a reference to, but the site is, hopefully only temporarily, inaccessible. I haven't even bothered trying to get the second of the listed packages needed.
This is quite annoying. Everything else has been working fine for a while now and I finally have Mandrake 10.1 and my preferred programs working right, save for xchat. It should be a matter of upgrading a single package and Just Working. But instead it's this nuisance.
The Ultima (Slackware) system Just Worked. But Slackware's package management is... minimal. Yet RPM seems to not quite enough. I've caught myself pondering Slackware (as it seems to just work), Gentoo, and FreeBSD (as each has a package management system that handles dependencies). I've thought a bit about Fedora, and I'm not sure if I'd really gain anything by going that route. I should not need to switch distributions just to get one program to work right, or at all. Though I have been thinking about moving away from Mandrake, I'd rather it happen on my terms.