Tobberoth wrote:

You know what I hate about Anki? It's overdependance on tons of extra libraries and plugins for python. Installing it on slackware is a MESS. I've compiled QT4 for over 20 minutes now

there's a cure for that: it starts with a 'd'...

...and ends with 'ebian'!  but really, if your distribution doesn't have packages for common things then don't you expect to build things yourself?

rich_f wrote:

If I want to add 14 fields to each fact, then I can freely do it. Fun stuff. (Not that I'd go that far, though.)

my heisig deck has, err... [checks deck] ...19!

cangy wrote:

there's a cure for that: it starts with a 'd'...

...and ends with 'ebian'!  but really, if your distribution doesn't have packages for common things then don't you expect to build things yourself?

Of course I do, that doesn't mean I can't be annoyed when I have to build 10 packages to get one relatively simple one to work

Slackware has packages actually, but just the really common important ones. Then you have slackbuilds.org which contains TONS of scripts. These scripts take a source tarball and compiles it then turns it into a slackware package. (Works awesomely for everything.... except QT, Gnome and stuff like that since it takes AGES to compile those ^^). For everything else, you either have to compile and install using ./configure make and make install (which sucks since it doesn't get an entry in slackware pkgtool making them hard to remove later) or you write your own SlackBuild script. Fortunately, writing your own script is pretty easy, you're basically just making a regular SH script telling the computer to unpack it, ./configure it with the right options, makeing it, make installing it to the right place, fixing the documentation and useing a slackware program to make it into a package. Not hard, but it's a bit harder for python programs (which a lot of the dependencies for Anki are).

So of course, this isn't a problem on Linuxes which come with apt-get etc... I've had a lot of problems with apt-gets dependency solving though, so I prefer Slackwares method... as long as I don't have to build 10 things to get one program to work

zodiac wrote:

Why use slackware in the first place?

Edit: As in, what are your reasons for using slackware? (Original post sounds too harsh sorry)

Well depends on what you mean. Reason for using Linux or reason for using Slackware in particular?

I prefer Slackware for various reasons. Basically, Ubuntu is a n00b system. I don't mean that "everyone who uses it is a n00b, l2linux" but I mean it IS marketed towards people who aren't very comfortable in Linux. Ubuntu tries to do everything for the user, making it much harder for the user when the user wants to do things Ubuntu hasn't accounted for, just like tons of Linux people dislike using OS X because it won't let you change as much as you want. With userfriendlyness comes limits. Often when you have problems with software and go to that IRC channel to ask about it, they say "Ubuntus fault, they do this and that for some reason". Trust me, this happens a lot.

Instead, I want a very basic linux distro which doesn't come with tons of shit I won't ever use, where I'm in full control. The option for me was between Gentoo and Slackware. Gentoo is good, but I find it to be very complex for something pretty simple, portage wasn't very fun to work with... all the flags etc.

Slackware is the perfect middle ground, everytime I have a problem it's usually either me who did something very wrong, or a bug with the software which I can get proper help with from their IRC channel. I find Slackware to be the easiest distro to troubleshoot and it's also very lite and customizable.

More or less, out of all the distros I've tried, Slackware is the best. That aside, I think chosing distro is like choosing whether you should have a Mac or a Win PC. It depends on what you need, both are good in their own right.

If you want less done for you automatically, without having to jump through hoops to install anything non-trivial, use Debian.

You're welcome to your distro choice, but don't take it out on Anki because your distro has a very limited number of available packages and/or is out of date.

I can't think of a dependency of anki that is unresonable. Could you enlighten us about that? I'm not QTs biggest fan, but is either QT or GTK.

Could you point out wich of the dependencies are anoying then?

Last edited by mentat_kgs (2008 December 10, 10:53 am)

Pff, you're being ridiculous. And you say you're a programmer, which makes it even harder to believe you're being serious.

That's unrelated to Tobberoth's complaint about "amount", but for the record: I had planned to keep 4.3 compatibility longer, but rendering issue with Thai and Arabic pushed the move to WebKit earlier.

resolve wrote:

Pff, you're being ridiculous. And you say you're a programmer, which makes it even harder to believe you're being serious.

How is it ridiculous to be annoyed by large amounts of dependencies?

Instead of simply downloading, compiling and running it, I need to look through a long list of dependencies, find those dependencies, check THEIR dependencies, download THOSE dependencies, check the dependencies of THOSE, download everything needed, compile and install it THEN install the program I need.

I know why they are used, like I said I'm a programmer. I know there are distros etc where dependency checking is checked automatically (unfortunately those automatic checks mess up from time to time). None of that changes the fact that a large amount of dependencies is annoying.

Just like it's annoying that sandwiches always land with the buttery side down. It's not unreasonable, it's physics. You can't change it, it's physics. It's still annoying.

Like I said from the start, it was a joke that I hate Anki because of dependencies, I don't hate Anki, I'm just annoyed by the amount of dependencies. Other SRS programs come with way fewer dependencies, so I don't see why it's "ridiculous" to point it out as an annoying aspect of the software.

Last edited by Tobberoth (2008 December 10, 11:19 am)

Furthermore, I'm going to call you out on the "automatic checks mess up from time to time". If you know what you're doing, the time spent dealing with the occasional packaging problems in the bleeding edge distribution of Debian is far smaller than the time you'll spend compiling and installing packages on Slackware.

resolve wrote:

If you know what you're doing

Ubuntu (the distro I was refering to) is marketed at people who have no idea what they are doing.

resolve wrote:

Your original comment was specifically describing what you "hate about Anki". If you wish to express frustration with dependencies that have been brought upon yourself by your distro choice in the future, please direct such frustration at the appropriate source.

Uh... since when did YOU decide what I can joke about on this forum?

Talk about being on a high horse.

It should also be noted that
1. Your post doesn't actually have ANY relevance to what I actually wrote.
2. Slackware didn't force Anki to have a lot of dependencies. My choice in Slackware forces me to deal with Ankis dependencies, nothing else.

Last edited by Tobberoth (2008 December 10, 11:37 am)

resolve wrote:

If you were "joking" in your original post, you didn't do a particularly good job of expressing it.

Anyway, I didn't "decide" anything. I asked you politely to direct your frustration at the appropriate place. As the author I'm no doubt overly sensitive to criticism, but at the same time I think you're exaggerating the requirements. The libraries are the minimum necessary for Anki to provide the features it does.

I agree, it isn't obvious in my first post that I was joking.. but I thought everyone realized that if I go through the effort of solving dependencies for Anki just to install it on Linux (when I already have it on my Windows AND OS X computers), I don't actually mean I hate Anki. If I did, I wouldn't use it at all. Besides, this is the internet, it's not that easy to express sarcasm over text. Regardless of that, I've posted several times since then that it was a joke, I can't be much clearer than that.

I don't see any more appropriate place than here. This isn't a complaint towards Anki. It isn't a complaint towards Slackware. I'm just venting frustration over installing a software most of the people on this site use. I could vent it with my friends in real life, but none of them use Anki nor Linux so this forum is a lot more appropriate.

Maybe you're right, I might be exaggerating. I've seen software with much more dependencies. The difference is that I don't install those programs because I don't think it's worth it when there are good alternatives with much fewer dependencies. Anki has no good altenative, it's the first software I've installed that needed me to install more than 2 other things JUST to get it to work. Just because I acknowledge the need for the dependencies doesn't mean I have to like it when software has a lot of dependencies.

Last edited by Tobberoth (2008 December 10, 12:02 pm)